★☆☆☆☆
One Star
After the hysteria of the Olympics passed, it seems that many an athlete found themselves flung to the summit of Mount Celebrity. Bright-eyed and able-bodied they may be, but rarely are they blessed with that sparkling charisma which is required to navigate the rocky path to media personality, before the country’s attention switches to the next batch of lobotomised karaoke stars.
Come 2016 there will be no contorted, gurning, slightly terrifying cartoons plastered across the underground to remind us that we’re (apparently) really into sports. In order to strike while the iron’s hot, PR teams have mobilised faster than Britney’s post-Vegas annulment and have carved TV careers out of toned bodies, good bone structure, and little else.
We have gawked at the abs on display in the swimming pool, but as US gold medallist Ryan Lochte demonstrated when grunting his way through a 90210 cameo (then commenting on the difficulty of “memorizing lines and trying to, like, say them and still, like, do movement”), Olympians should stick to what they do best: running, jumping, and looking good in lycra.
No exception to the rule is Tom Daley, British diving bronze medallist and tween heartthrob whose autocue-reading skills are about as natural as a GCSE French Oral. Olympian hero-worship is second only to fawning over K-Mid’s royal foetus in the list of things that make me want to emigrate to the Siberian tundra. Combine it with a ‘Celebrity’ reality show, however, and you have another thing altogether. It’s a peculiar vein of schadenfreude that’s brought out by watching those desperately clinging onto the outer fringes of the D-list undergo all manner of demeaning rituals on national television.
I’ve sat through them regurgitating animal entrails on I’m a Celebrity, felt kind of weird watching them go cold turkey on Celebrity Rehab and still can’t shake the image of Rebecca Loos’ porcine masturbation on The Farm. ITV, in all its infinite wisdom, has a particular knack for taking slightly more respectable competitions and adding in the potential for serious bodily harm (see Dancing on Ice; like Strictly Come Dancing, but everyone’s waiting for the inevitable ice-skate to the jugular).
In the Daley-fest that is Splash!, not only are contestants forced to endure Chirpy Northerner Vernon Kay, but they must also throw themselves off a diving board higher than two double-decker buses. Just in case the promise of seeing celebrities hurtling towards possible injury doesn’t grab your attention (which, for those of us who saw Jade Ewen as the final nail in the Sugababes coffin, is more than enough), producers have added dubstep and glitzy set-pieces.
There are also tarted-up swimming costumes which wouldn’t look out of place in a strip joint and a dive/dance opening number strangely reminiscent of the final pageant routine in Miss Congeniality. Oh, and Jo Brand is one of the judges.
