Vain, vacuous ... it’s thumbs down for these modern-day gladiators
NEW Labour’s pledge, when Tony Blair swept into Downing Street 20 years ago, was: ‘Education, education, education.’ Thanks to Honest Tone, children of the Nineties such as Dino and Brandon have grown up barely capable of speaking in coherent sentences, let alone reading.
They left school unable to do anything but stand still for spray tans and selfies.
These heavily tattooed lads are contestants on reality show Bromans (ITV2), a sort of Generation Game for the porn era.
In a freshly designed Roman amphitheatre, eight vacuous boys tackle gladiatorial tests of strength, cheered on by their girlfriends in gold bikinis and gallons of lip filler.
Dino had heard of the Romans. ‘A lot of things come from Rome,’ he said confidently, ‘like Latin, I fink, maybe. Did they have pizza then?’
But Brandon was completely baffled. Staring round the set, he marvelled, ‘I’ve gone 2,000 years back — I’ve never lived that far back, I’ve only ever seen lampposts and pavements.’
The boys and girls all call each other ‘babe’, which is easier than going to the mental effort of remembering names.
They say things like: ‘Hand on my heart, I put 150 per cent effort in.’ And: ‘Looking good is majorly important for me.’ Much was made of the fact that these were real couples — none of them married, of course, but neither were they strangers paired off by the producers.
ITV2 is looking for its next Love Island, the runaway hit that consisted of half-naked young people posing in the sunshine. But why stop at ‘half-naked’?
To get Bromans started, the boys were ordered to strip off and parade nude in the plastic colosseum while their ‘babes’ dug in the arena sand, searching for bags that contained gladiator costumes.
After that, they had to load chariots with buckets of stones and drag them round a track without bumping into the scenery.
It’s like Ben Hur without the excitement, the story, the morality or any point at all.
This is a long way from the platespinning and disco-dancing of the Brucie days. Presenter Tom Bell invoked the spirit of Larry Grayson, though, with lots of laboured innuendos about ‘my horn’ and ‘the emperor’s ring’.
It’s an achievement, really, to breed a generation that can’t tell the difference between Up Pompeii! and a Mary Beard documentary — and that doesn’t care, as long as they get to flash their six-packs in the sunshine.
These are Tony Blair’s millennials. The nation can be proud.
Real achievement was celebrated by six adventurous souls in Without Limits: Vietnam (BBC1), a travelogue with a twist. The explorers — three in a LandCruiser, three rattling along on Seventies Soviet motorbikes — were all defying disabilities to make the trip.
It sometimes feels TV only takes notice of disabled people when they are doing something extraordinary: the Paralympians, the autistic geniuses. But that’s a curmudgeonly gripe. It’s great to see telly paying any sort of attention, let alone portraying disability in such a positive, entertaining way.
The six included Vicky, the teenager who lost a leg at Alton Towers two years ago, and Mary, whose dwarfism was much less debilitating than her chronic depression.
All of them were courageous and likeable, supporting each other as they discovered the spectacular landscapes along the Ho Chi Minh trail.
The climax, as they helped paraplegic Steve haul his wheelchair up a cliff to visit a stalactite-filled cave, was inspiring... and a welcome antidote to Bromans.