What’s going on with Davina McCall? It feels as if TV land, in its infinite sexism, has decided she is too old to host one of the big singing competitions but too young to do cosy Sunday evening documentaries about trains or sparrows. In the interim period, she’s become Take a Break magazine incarnate, churning out exercise tips and heartfelt reactions to nearby sad things.
So, in one sense, This Time Next Year (10 April, 8pm, ITV) is the perfect format for her, a real-lives sobfest where people show up and say how they want their life to change, then “through the magic of TV” we immediately see them a year later. Well, what we actually see is Davina walking across the studio to be replaced by one-year-older-Davina, wearing the same dress and the same haircut but with the weight of her own mortality resting a few pounds more heavily on her shoulders.
It is an appealing conceit on paper: who wouldn’t like to press a button and see whether they’ll be thinner, happier and loved? But the idea faces some obvious issues in execution. Firstly, the stories picked are too soppy: we get a baby who is deaf but is going to hear; a mother and daughter who want to shed 15st; a couple who are trying IVF; a woman who wants to win Miss World; and a woman who needs reconstructive face surgery. Each one comes with a heart-wrenching film about their struggle and a maudlin piano accompaniment. It’s like Comic Relief without the relief.
For a show like this to work, there needs to be light and shade. I want to see a woman come out with her tub-of-trash boyfriend who’s eating Cheerios from the packet while they’re being interviewed. She’ll say to Davina: “I’m going to dump him, move to Lisbon and start writing my screenplay,” and then they come back a year later and he’s moved in, isn’t paying any rent and she’s the social media intern for Southern Rail. Otherwise, it just doesn’t feel real.
The other issue is that as soon as they come through the “NEXT YEAR” door you can normally see whether they’ve achieved their goal or not (spoiler: they all have). Once Davina has cackled and told them how amazing they look, they go back to show their journey. But by that point who cares? You know how things pan out. They should call the show We Spoiled the Ending.
ITV tries about 40 of these weird, shiny-floor formats a year and they nearly all get cancelled after one series, yet there is a clever failsafe mechanism that could mean that this show runs for ever. For there to even be the option of a third series, the producers would have to have already recorded the “this year” segments for 2019. And lo and behold, the production company has confirmed that the next series is already commissioned – pretty unusual for this kind of format. Using this strategy the show could stay on television indefinitely, lest producers have to tell a bloke in a wheelchair that the footage of him walking for the first time won’t air because ITV has chosen to replace it with, oh, I don’t know, a Keith Lemon-hosted live version of Tinder where people pick a sexual partner by swiping through 100 people on a giant human merry-go-round.
