Dear Hole in the Wall: you were like a holiday romance, a fleeting burst of sunshine on an otherwise overcast day. You burned brightly and then you disappeared, like the JD Salinger of gameshows about people you barely recognise being clonked into a swimming pool by some polystyrene.
This weekend it was announced that after just two series, Hole in the Wall was being put out to the knackers yard. Some will blame this on the career implosion of the show's most recent host, Anton du Beke. Others will blame it on the fact that it was a cynical and deliberate underestimation of the British public's intelligence. Others might point out that the sight of Phil Tufnell's genitals shawshanking around beneath an obscenely tight silver wetsuit doesn't traditionally qualify as Saturday teatime entertainment.
Hole in the Wall may have been brainless, lowest-common-denominator television – but look back and you'll see that it closed the loop begun by Clive James all those years ago, when he'd fill entire television shows with footage of wilfully stupid foreign game shows. The emergence of Hole in the Wall marked the moment when, rather than sitting on the sidelines and sneering, UK television decided to roll up its sleeves and start putting British people in its own versions of these shows (even if the format originated elsewhere).
It paved the way for shows such as Total Wipeout and The Whole 19 Yards, shows where things such as skill and ability are sidelined in favour of YouTube-friendly outright physical humiliation. Next time you're watching Vernon Kay gleefully hop from foot to foot because a hapless, disorientated recruitment consultant has just covered themselves in goo on The Whole 19 Yards, know that it's only happening because Hole in the Wall once forced Vanessa Feltz to dress up like a shiny tadpole and crash into a swimming pool because she couldn't make her body into the shape of the letter N properly.
It'll be interesting to see what fills the gap left by Hole in the Wall. BBC1 clearly isn't giving up on slapstick – as demonstrated by the forthcoming Steve Jones vehicle 101 Ways to Leave a Gameshow, which sounds as though it'll take Hole in the Wall's template for physical shenanigans and give it a flashy new makeover. But wouldn't it be nice to ease back on the humiliation a little? The TV schedules are already full of famous people demeaning themselves to stay in the public eye – what we really need to see is the return of It's a Knockout or Finders Keepers. They would seem like a breath of fresh air at the moment – get Stuart Hall on the case this instant.
