“Let’s make this a little more interesting, shall we?” growls Brian Cox, aka Succession’s Logan Roy, in 007: Road to a Million (Prime Video). Oh, if only, Brian. If only. I don’t think there was a moment in the whole series when I was even half-interested.

It’s not that this is a bad game show (though it is). There are plenty of those about. What irks is that it uses dramatic James Bond-style music, mentions 007 all the time and has Cox, the “controller” (sitting in what is supposed to be an MI6-type mission control centre with a huge bank of screens, but I suspect is actually a small airless studio somewhere off a dual carriageway), and yet nothing the contestants have to do is remotely like in the Bond films.

If one of them had been sucked out of an aeroplane window at 30,000ft and another sprayed in gold paint until they suffered “skin asphyxiation” (yes, I know there’s no such thing), then fair play, my interest would have been piqued. Slightly.

Instead they just have to crack some boring codes and scale some tall structures in harnesses or swim to a boat where they find a few tame but bored-looking scorpions that were probably thinking, like me, “But, Brian Cox, you gave a fabulous performance in one of the best TV dramas ever made and which we may not see the like of again. Why has your agent let you take a gig in which you are like a pound shop Alan Sugar?” I’m with you, scorpions.

Because this smacks more of The Apprentice than 007, though with a much bigger budget, taking the contestants all over the world — Thailand, Austria, Mexico, the Bahamas. Granted it also has a flick of Celebrity SAS Who Dares Wins and other dashes of I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! (there are snakes) and The Fortune Hotel (there’s a challenge involving keeping a poker face while looking inside briefcases).

• Brian Cox: from Logan Roy to 007 quizmaster

Cox, like Sugar, does not get on any planes with the contestants, and he has even less interaction with them, merely barking orders to far-flung places in a supposedly scary Logan voice from his comfy chair. “What happens when ordinary people are put in extraordinary situations?” he says. His heart doesn’t sound to be in it.

In fact, though he is purportedly the “controller”, you get the impression that his job is mainly recording voiceovers with a few pieces to camera in which he looks quite bored. I watched thinking: “I wonder what Logan Roy would make of this.”

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It must be doing something right, because this is a second series. Or could that be more to do with commercial interests than eyeballs? This is on Prime Video, which is owned by Amazon. Also owned by Amazon is MGM, which owns James Bond. So what we may have here is a milking of the Bond cash cow. But then why make the link so tenuous? Yes, we have Aston Martins, briefcases of cash and the odd shoehorned mention of a martini, but these are mere Bond accessories. It’s like placing a glitterball and a feather boa in the Tipping Point studios and calling it Strictly Come Dancing.
★★☆☆☆

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