The 2012 Olympics happened so long ago, didn’t they? It feels as if they took place in a different age, back in the golden days before Brexit cleaved the country in two and when toilet roll was still readily available.
The stars of 2012 have also faded, something underlined by the new Comedy Central gameshow Gods of the Game, in which Sir Chris Hoy – titan of the velodrome, winner of more Olympic gold medals than any other Briton – races three members of the public across a medium-sized lake in a swan-shaped pedalo.
This is the central premise: could a celebrated Olympian beat Joe Public at something a bit rubbish? So, not only does episode one contain the Hoy pedalo game, but it also makes Olympic gymnast Max Whitlock muck about on some monkey bars in a park, and gold medal-winning hockey player Sam Quek go tenpin bowling.
Overseeing this weird dystopia is Sir Bradley Wiggins, or to be more accurate – and I promise I’m not making this up – a giant Wiggins sitting atop a throne in a vast arena wearing a breastplate fitted with the most artificial-looking abs since Darryn Lyons took his shirt off on Celebrity Big Brother in 2011. At no point during Gods of the Game does Wiggins ever look truly comfortable. This is a man whose reputation has been eroded by claims of doping (which he denies), and who last year said that television was “quite vacuous” and “most people on TV are c***s”. Watching him, you get the feeling that the cameras started rolling at the exact moment he realised what he was getting himself into.
The challenges, meanwhile, have a certain veneer of charm. They’re so unadorned and shonky you may as well be watching a bunch of kids muck about in a playground. It’s the same feeling you got the first time you watched Takeshi’s Castle and recoiled at how dirty the water looked. When it works – when you see the vestiges of Hoy’s Olympic ambition flare up when it looks for a moment as if he might lose his pedalo race – it’s quite entertaining.
But when it doesn’t, and you have to spend several minutes watching people ineptly slap hockey balls into bowling pins, it can really sap your energy. And this is a problem. Gods of the Game is shooting for high-concept absurdity, but for the most part it falls short and only manages to be slightly diverting.
It’s a weird thing to say about a deliberately ironic low-budget Comedy Central gameshow, but I was expecting more from Gods of the Game. Its production company Mad Monk is responsible for some genuine lunacy. Sky’s Wild Things won the Rose d’Or and had such elaborate production design that I’m certain it inspired The Masked Singer. Seven years ago I called My Little Princess “the best dating show I’ve ever seen”. I loved Banzai so much that I once spent a full summer unsuccessfully trying to get a job on it.
These are the delirious heights these producers can hit, and the ones it was presumably hoping to hit with Gods of the Game. And yet something about it feels a little flat. If the Olympics were about striving for brilliance and achieving it, then Gods of the Game is about aiming for mediocrity and not quite making it. Which, in fairness, makes it as relevant to 2020 as the Olympics were to 2012.
Gods of the Game is on Comedy Central tonight at 8.30pm.
