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Handcuffed: Last Pair Standing is, says presenter Jonathan Ross<\/a>, a \u201csurvival show \u2013 where you have to survive someone else\u201d. Taking its cues, perhaps, from the classic prisoners-on-the-run movie The Defiant Ones, Channel 4\u2019s new series sees people tethered to their ideological opposites in a feat of endurance: the pair who stay cuffed together the longest win \u00a3100,000.<\/p>\n If the premise has the shape of a social experiment, then the execution renders Handcuffed little more than an exercise in unedifying provocation. The pairings make Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau\u2019s Odd Couple look like a match made in heaven: we have a fusty right-wing aristocrat cuffed to a working-class ex-prison warden; a self-described \u201ctraditional homemaker\u201d and \u201cmassive prude\u201d cuffed to a towering, tattooed gay porn star; a Green Party<\/a> councillor and a Reform<\/a> supporter; a bar worker and a multimillionaire; a queer feminist and a manosphere-immersed \u201calpha male\u201d \u2013 the sort of man for whom \u201cgym\u201d is a verb. <\/p>\n The chaining together of these polar-opposite personalities is ostensibly a sort of test of empathy \u2013 maybe, the series posits, they can find some shared humanity underneath their differences. You know the shtick: \u201cSure, I\u2019m the reason that you can\u2019t afford to own a home, but didn\u2019t you know we have a mutual love of folk music and fettuccine?\u201d Alas, in most cases, this is a non-starter. It becomes clear quite early on that the show offers nothing more than flimsy rope bridges to reconcile the yawning schisms of British politics and culture wars. One pair doesn\u2019t even reach the 13-hour mark: Sir Benjamin Slade, referred to faux-chummily as \u201cSir Ben\u201d, strops and takes bolt-cutters to the cuffs after his combative partner quarrels with him and his wealthy, Nigel Farage-loving friends. Several other pairings end just as inauspiciously \u2013 nothing is learnt, or achieved. (Sometimes, the handcuffs are unlocked out of spite: the only thing sweeter than winning thousands of pounds may be your enemy not winning it.) <\/p>\n The spectre of Reform hangs over Handcuffed, in ways both serious and throwaway (one of Sir Ben\u2019s pets is named Nigel; others are named things like Boris and Kwasi). One woman describes herself as the \u201cfemale Nigel Farage\u201d \u2013 a horrifying hypothetical, even if the comparison seems ultimately ill-earned. I suppose there\u2019s something admirable in this series\u2019 willingness to admit just how inextricable the political and personal really are. But it creates a dynamic that\u2019s fatally lopsided. In some of the pairings, we have one party who is entirely relatable and unobjectionable, tethered to someone who harbours a deep disrespect for their entire moral framework. It becomes less a case of \u201cmeeting in the middle\u201d than one person vainly trying to coax the other towards compassion. <\/p>\n Given the inherent comedy of its premise \u2013 the dysfunctional handcuffing conceit has been used in everything from M*A*S*H to The Simpsons toI Love Lucy \u2013 it\u2019s criminal just how unamusing this series manages to be. If nothing else, Handcuffed is an instructive look at the fallacies of modern British politics: the sight of a room full of upper-class relics loudly extolling the charisma of Farage ought to rubbish any notion that Reform is a party for working people. But it\u2019s not telling us anything we don\u2019t already know. More often than not, biases are ossified, and the gulfs between people have seldom seemed starker. If Handcuffed is indeed an experiment \u2013 and not just a cheap excuse for TV sensationalism \u2013 then it is surely a failed one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":319064,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[146,85,46,411],"class_list":["post-319063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=319063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319063\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/319064"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=319063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=319063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=319063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}