When a television series has been around for a while, it faces a choice. Does it carry on, ploughing the same old trench over and over again without deviation until viewers get bored and stop watching? Or does it attempt a high-risk format tweak?
Sometimes that can be a good thing (The Voice became much better when it cut back on live shows), and sometimes it backfires completely (The X Factor six-chair challenge is basically bear-baiting with glitter). But it’s often necessary. British TV is full of hoary old veterans in danger of dying of irrelevance, so here are the fixes that will rejuvenate them.
MasterChef
A change doesn’t always have to a new innovation – sometimes it can simply be the return of an old favourite. Think how much better MasterChef would be if they brought back the old Passion Test, which was a real thing where the contestants had to sit in front of Gregg and John and demonstrate their love of cooking by shouting or wailing about their dead relatives in such an un-British demonstration of abject hysteria that it made your genitals shrink to a microdot. God, I miss the Passion Test.
Dragons’ Den
Change is already afoot on the long-running BBC Two series, with Theo Paphitis being replaced by a man who looks identical to Theo Paphitis. This should continue. From now on, all the Dragons should have a legion of exact physical lookalikes in the wings, and inventors can only get their money if they first fight their way down a corridor of furious Deborah Meaden clones. Too much? Then let’s mix things up next time by hiring a Dragon who isn’t an almighty swaggering berk who dresses like an estate agent and doesn’t derive a weird sexual kick from exploiting or rejecting the desperate at their most vulnerable.
The Great British Bake Off
There’s more than a fighting chance that our beloved Bake Off will move to ITV next year. If that’s the case, these changes are all but guaranteed: 1) Mel and Sue will be replaced by Carol Vorderman. 2) Mary Berry will be replaced by Katie Price. 3) Paul Hollywood will get to judge the show in skintight racing leathers, and give sympathetic scores to any bake that can be crushed down and used as a makeshift talcum powder. 4) There’ll be a live studio audience that repeatedly tries and fails to clap along with the theme tune. 5) Thanks to an ongoing channel-wide product placement deal with Procter & Gamble, every showstopper bake will include Daz as a primary ingredient.
Countdown
After 33 years on air, Countdown is as concrete a format as you can get. Nothing major should be changed here, although I would recommend either shocking the studio audience with electricity so they look a bit more lively – or sporadically pelting the contestants with bees during the numbers round.
Watchdog
The signature sequence of Watchdog is when a presenter visits the office of a fraudulent CEO and shouts questions at them until they get in their car and drive off. As fun as this is, it’s far too short. How about getting the presenter to follow the CEO into their car and punch them in the face while they try to drive, then dress up as their wife and seduce them until their entire life becomes a waking nightmare of confusion and suspicion and they have no choice but to refund an old lady £25 for her faulty guttering.
The Apprentice
Now 11 years old, The Apprentice has long since shed any notion that it’s about clever people looking for a great job. It’s now so transparently about self-interested dimwits extravagantly mucking up basic tasks that the BBC should just bite the bullet and give the people what they want. Why not kidnap the candidates, inject them with a powerful hallucinogen and drop them inside a revolving hall of mirrors full of warped fairground music and crying children, then leave them there till they can adequately construct an Ikea Billy bookcase, at which point Alan Sugar will appear and let them drive go-karts for the afternoon? You’d watch that, right?
