Holly’s channel hopping
IF YOU’RE not sure that you want to carry on watching ITV’s THE GAMES (9pm), the celebrity challenge being co-hosted by Holly Willoughby, then you could always switch over to BBC1 tonight for the penultimate part of FREEZE THE FEAR WITH WIM HOF (9pm), the celebrity challenge being co-hosted by Holly Willoughby.
This is the show, you may recall, that’s set in the snowy mountains of northern Italy, where shouty Dutch beardy fellow Wim, aka The Iceman, has been telling a bunch of celebs that if they train their minds to conquer their fears – not just their fear of getting stupidly cold, although he does bang on about that one an awful lot, but also their fear of other stuff, such as falling from a stupid height – then they’ll be able to cope with any future challenge life throws at them. Or some such nonsense.
This weekWim sets the celebs what seems a simple opening challenge: to perform a few basic yoga moves.
But it turns out that he has a surprise in store, which is no great surprise because he always has one of those.
The surprise this time is that he wants each celebrity to hold one of their yoga poses while balancing on a ridiculously narrow beam suspended hundreds of feet above a frozen waterfall.
Yes, quite.
Personally, I’d argue that a fear of holding a yoga pose while balancing on a ridiculously narrow beam suspended hundreds of feet above a frozen waterfall is a fear that one would be well advised to cling on to, affording you an infinitely better chance of a long and healthy life.
Don’t DoThatYou Idiot,With Mike Ward, is what I’d have called my own version of this show.This is possibly whyWim got the gig and I didn’t.
Elsewhere, the second night of BRITAIN’S TOP TAKEAWAYS (BBC2, 8pm), focusing this time on food from south Asia, reinforces something that dawned on me in episode one.
Namely, that watching this show actually makes me hungry.
This has never happened when I’ve watched MasterChef, say, or The Great British Bake Off (most of the stuff on that makes me feel rather icky), or even Great British Menu, particularly its most recent series, celebrating the BBC’s century of broadcasting, where every chef’s dish had to take its influence from some TV show or other (“My liver is inspired by 24 Hours In A&E…”).
I also rather like the members of the public they’ve picked to be judges on this takeaway contest, taking nightly home deliveries of all this food, ploughing their way through it, and then giving out their scores.
Minor stars after just two nights, by the end of the week these people will surely be huge.