By all accounts, Dave’s new clip show The Hurting should be a leaden slog to sit through. Because, well, it’s a clip show. It’s You’ve Been Framed in all but name. It’s the very lowest common denominator, a succession of sent-in clips where people fall over and bang into things and get bitten on the bum by a dog before being mangled by a deckchair again and again and again over and over until the whole thing becomes a meaningless smear of pixels. It’s nothing you’ve never seen before, especially if you’ve ever seen the American show Fail Army, because The Hurting is literally just Fail Army with a new voiceover.
But what a new voiceover it is! The Hurting is written and narrated by Jake Yapp – most familiar for his lightning-speed TV summaries on Charlie Brooker’s Wipe series – and he appears to have approached the entire endeavour like a dying man desperate to leave his mark on an uncaring world.
From the footage I’ve seen, Yapp puts absolutely everything he’s got into The Hurting. His narration is delivered with a breathlessness that’s entirely at odds with the clip-show genre, where audibly bored hosts have historically put a minimal level of emphasis on effort. There are several lovingly composed original songs. There are long, clip-ignoring digressions about the ethical ramifications of cultural appropriation in clip art. There seems to be some sort of through line where Yapp’s marriage begins to disintegrate, Marion and Geoff-style. At one point, he gets fired and the entire show is rebranded as a low-grade photocopy of itself called Plonkers Make You LOL, hosted by someone from Towie. The actual footage quickly becomes an afterthought, replaced by the far giddier thrill of listening to someone riffing about nothing at a million miles an hour as if their life genuinely depends on it.
To call it refreshing would be an understatement, especially when compared with the immobile behemoth that is You’ve Been Framed. That series has forever coasted on a thin will-this-do mentality. There were the days when producers just slung charisma-free presenting novices such as Lisa Riley and that bloke who was primarily famous for being mates with Robbie Williams in front of the camera and watched them strangle themselves on the autocue. These days, watching You’ve Been Framed has become even harder. It’s almost like subjecting yourself to torture porn, as you listen to Harry Hill’s boundless energy being crushed in the machinery of endless clips until he starts to catatonically list celebrities who the subjects vaguely resemble, like a toddler finding animal shapes in the clouds. Everything gets broken on You’ve Been Framed, but nothing more than the spirit of whoever they hire to front the thing. The same thing might happen to The Hurting down the line, but at least Yapp is putting up one hell of a fight.
The Hurting also answers the question of whether clip shows can even survive in the modern TV landscape, when people can type anything from “dance fails” to “skater breaks pelvis” into YouTube and instantly find a stream of rubbernecking cruelty that’s specifically personalised to them. The answer is that, yes, they can; but only if they evolve.
The Hurting represents such an evolution. It’s still staggeringly lowbrow, and any attempts to binge-watch will rapidly liquify your brain. But it’s elevated beyond measure by Yapp’s full-frontal attack on the genre. The Hurting is honestly very funny, and I promise you’ll enjoy it far more than you’d ever want to.
