This week, right when we need it the least, Channel 4 will air a Wife Swap Brexit special. Obviously you know what a Wife Swap Brexit special will be like. You already understand the agony of being involuntarily chained to someone whose political views are directly and violently at odds with your own, because you had to go and visit your parents last Christmas.
Still, it seems needlessly antagonistic. Wife Swap, even when it’s not deliberately using a monumental moment of peacetime crisis as a vehicle for moderately diverting entertainment, is a bearpit of a show. During its initial run from 2003 to 2009, it quickly struck upon a formula so toxic that it was a genuine wonder anyone actually applied to appear on it. Two diametrically opposed couples swapped partners for a week, and instantly and irreparably went about hating each other.
It was hostile and nasty – Big Brother with a surface sheen of social experiment – and possibly the best argument for echo chambers there has ever been. Wife Swap is awful. It’s the very worst of humanity. Hitching it to a time bomb like Brexit will be an outright disaster. Needless to say, I can’t wait for it.
Because Wife Swap still has its charms. It has a habit of pairing up the most militant member of each couple – I guarantee that the hardcore remoaner will end up living with the angriest brexiteer – and leaving the moderate other halves to get on with it. Invariably, a moment will come when the moderates realise that being married to such unswerving idealists has worn them down, and the briefest flicker of flirtation will pass between them. After all, there is nothing sexier than not having to maintain a rigidly exclusionary worldview every now and then.
In fact, screw it, I’m completely up for Brexit Wife Swap. I’m so up for it that I think we should revive a bunch of other factual entertainment formats purely as an excuse to explore Brexit. Here are my suggestions.
Brexit Faking It
In the original Faking It, a novice was trained in an unfamiliar field until experts unwittingly accepted them as a peer. Let’s do the same with Brexit. Let’s find someone who voted leave and try to pass them off as a remainer. Let’s teach them how to pretend to like immigrants, and how to pretend that they don’t care what colour their passport is. Let’s teach them the metric system. Eventually, as a finale, let’s see if they can buy a copy of the Guardian without twitching. Only then will they pass the test.
The Supersizers Eat Brexit
Sue Perkins and Giles Coren are forced to live in a theoretical post-Brexit world, where increased trade tariffs have left them only able to afford food produced within the confines of the UK by exclusively British companies. The series lasts for two episodes, before Coren dies of excessive Yeo Valley yoghurt consumption.
Undercover Brexiteer
Similar to Faking It, this series will dress a member of the 48% up as a leave voter and see if they can fool the public. Will Simon, a 43-year-old vegetarian lecturer from Islington, be able to convincingly nod at a photo of Paul Nuttall? Will he be able to attach a St George’s flag to his television aerial without literally dying of shame? Will his prosthetic chin come loose in Wetherspoons and reveal the pitifully patchy beard he’s spent three years unsuccessfully cultivating?
The Brexit Audience
Revival of the failed Channel 4 show where a subject was trailed by a crowd of 50 people who democratically made every decision on their behalf. Only this will be Brexit themed, so every decision will split the crowd almost exactly in half, and everyone will refuse to compromise and they’ll all have murdered each other by the end of the first hour.
The Secret Life of Theresa May
A fixed-rig camera is set up in May’s living room to see what she gets up to when all the adults have left the room. Spoiler: 95% of the show is just her staring at her hands and screaming “WHAT HAVE I DONE?”
Wife Swap Brexit special is on Channel 4 on Thursday at 9pm.
