Saracen from the original Gladiators strikes a pose. Photograph: Rex Features
It had to happen: Gladiators, the 90s Saturday night television favourite is coming back.
This was the show which featured tough physical contests, pitting ordinary civilians against circus-übermensch types in Lycra costumes. Cloned from a US original (in that demeaning era when we were the ones copying their shows) Gladiators somehow fused the spirit of It's a Knockout and wrestling - both British and American - into something new and exciting. Britain loved it. Gladiators got regular audiences of a whopping 14m viewers.
Sky One is doing the honours this time around, introducing a whole new generation of steroid-muscly-looking men and women who have voluntarily submitted to the absurd and infantilising business of having their names removed, to be replaced by Battleaxe (that's a man, I'm assuming), Destroyer, Inferno, Tornado and Predator.
There are going to be some changes, apparently. The original hosts, John Fashanu and Ulrika Johnson, are getting the great big safety-padded elbow. This time it's Ian Wright and Kirsty Gallacher. It's not quite clear how many of the original games will be retained, but we are promised bigger and better novelties in the mix. I'm not sure what happened to the original Gladiators. Those poor souls don't appear to have had much of an afterlife as "celebrities".
I'm hoping the travelator event is still there: the game in which you had to run up a downward-moving belt. This is an ideal game for the Web 2.0 age. As you can see here, already people are having their own travelator events at train stations throughout the UK, setting their own times for running up the down escalator and uploading exciting video highlights to the net.
But what they surely have to maintain is the glorious tradition of having the male gladiators enter the arena to the stirring sound of Thin Lizzy's The Boys are Back in Town (I'm sorry to say I can't remember what tune the women came on to). A whole generation became acquainted with that track just through Gladiators, and perhaps were unaware that it ever had any existence prior to the programme. There was no smirking, no grinning from the Lycra bulgers as they strode on to Phil Lynott's thrilling power-chords. It was always taken fantastically seriously, and there's something about that song itself, no matter how macho and sexist and ridiculous, which compels a sort of cheesy fascination. The first verse is as follows:
Guess who just got back today? Them wild-eyed boys that had been away Haven't changed, have much to say But man, I still think them cats are crazy
Them cats? Crazy? You bet. The "boys" have been away ... on a kibbutz? Doing a VSO project in Ghana? They are legends in their home town, though; electrifyingly glamorous and cool. The first two verses appear to be spoken by some beta-male hanger on, addressing a local girl who has, no doubt, secretly tried to persuade herself she is no longer in love with the boys, although as she is "living downtown/Driving all the old men crazy" she is obviously busy with her job as a lap-dancer in a care home for the elderly.
Mystifyingly, the third and fourth verses appear to be spoken by one of the boys themselves, with much drunken self-congratulation recalling their great adventures. "Johnny's" would seem to be the home of one of the charming gang, rather than a bar, where one local woman apparently had the ungrateful bad taste to slap his face! The final two verses revert to the awestruck observer, saying "If the boys want to fight you'd better let them". This should read: if the boys want to dress up in tight red outfits and bonk each other over the heads with pugil sticks, you'd better let them.
If we Gladiators fans think there are more appropriate "gladiator entry" songs for 2008, we'd better start thinking of them now.
