Channel 4’s The Jump, in which celebrities compete in winter sports, with the bottom two performing ski jumps, has been cancelled or, as they put it, “rested”, and will not be shown at the same time as the 2018 Winter Olympics. Good. I’ve always found the premise of The Jump disturbing – it’s one thing to mock Z-list celebrities, quite another to put them into situations where they could be injured or even killed.
The injury list from The Jump is as long as my thankfully unbroken arm. Contestants have gone into the show intact and come out rattling like boxes of snow-damaged Meccano. Strictly Come Dancing professional Ola Jordan badly injured her leg; actress Tina Hobley broke her arm in two places; Olympic gymnast Beth Tweddle broke vertebrae in her neck and had to have part of her hip removed, and so on.
How could this be justified? Putting barely trained people into such dangerous situations isn’t entertainment, it’s irresponsible lunacy and ethically questionable. It’s disgusting enough when I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here has contestants munching on insects (in this case, my sympathies are with the insects).
The Jump puts actual human beings in real harm’s way, in a fashion that would cause uproar if it featured ordinary members of the public.
The Jump confirmed something for me: that there’s a damned subordinate circle of modern celebrity, where the participants are deemed to be lower, to be worth less, than the non-famous, who at least don’t have to consider having their bones broken in snowdrifts to make their cash.
Channel 4 should consider itself supremely fortunate that there were no incidents of paralysis, or even death, on The Jump. Good riddance to this weird, dark, depressing show – let it “rest” for all eternity.
