» Telly Talk: Gladiators ready?
Last Woman Standing, BBC3, Tuesday
Time was when I used to laugh – loudly – at American Gladiators and how it epitomised all that seemed American and not British in its ‘anything for a spectacle’ mentality. I’d come back from the pub/club in the small wee hours and howl with laughter at the very idea of such ridiculousness ever being shown to those not intoxicated or bereft of a healthy sleep pattern. Surely that would be taking it seriously. Surely the civilised world would come crashing down when people hitting each other with giant Q-tips became approved prime-time viewing.
Fast-forward roughly a decade and I’m tucking into my Saturday teatime dose of Total Wipeout, safe in the knowledge that I can watch Andy McNab surviving extreme trials thrown at him by the gods (or nature, depending upon your belief system)anytime I want and that BBC3 is just about to start the girl version of it’s Last Man Standing survival contest. This is more than a drunken spectator sport now. This is an entire genre with commissioning editors creating different versions for the kids, the teens, the adultescents and the family viewers. And I hadn’t even noticed.
Alright, so maybe I’d been a bit snobby when they introduced the British version of Gladiators, but after that I just took it as being It’s A Knockout from the ‘70s meets David Attenborough on a bit of a trek. Quite how that became picking up a group of self-described ‘well hard’ young blokes and getting them to complete anthropologically interesting but completely alien manhood tests around the world I’m not sure. That was Last Man Standing, launched in 2007, in which they went around losing contestants and demonstrating endurance in the pursuit of cultural understanding – and being the hardest. A sort of ‘take from it what works for you’ format.
Now the series is back with fit young women stepping up to the mark in an equal rights demonstration of the toughness of tribal ladies – the first epsiode sees our five athletes learning Huka-Huka wrestling with the Kamayura Tribe in Brazil. In a week. It is very informative, but also quite scantily clad. Lots of learning and growing, but cramming a lifetimes’ cultural learning into seven days. Makes me feel like I’m reading Darwin For Dummies with the grown up book’s dust jacket over the cover. It’s still a spectacle. But is that the only way we’ll learn these days?
In Roman times, the gladiators served to distract the plebs from their troubles, to keep them from uprising. The violence people craved was provided, but in a manner controlled by the powers that be. Gone are the Spitting Image shows of old on a Saturday night, instead replaced with spectacles. Some hitting each other, some hitting out at nature, and some just hitting the high notes.
Victoria Nangle
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