Do you remember when Edwina Currie threw a glass of champagne over John McCririck as he lay naked in his bed, nearly splashing his man boobs? Of course you do. It was deeply unedifying and unmissable television. She called him a pig, he taunted her over her affair with John Major, and we (or, certainly, I) sat at home rapt as reality TV hit its entertainment peak.
That was Channel 4’s Celebrity Wife Swap in 2006. So what does it serve up in 2026 with 20 extra years of experience behind it? A pound shop Wife Swap, that’s what. A tawdry knock-off of the same sort of idea but with all the humour surgically removed.
We can forgive Handcuffed: Last Pair Standing for creating conflict between its participants, paired up because they are opposites. Most reality television does that because people getting on nicely doesn’t make for high ratings. So it chained a fat-hating gym bro to a woman who supports “body positivity” and wears a T-shirt proclaiming “Fat Bitch”; it cuffed a woman with ADHD who never stops talking to one who values peace and quiet; a left-wing working-class man to a toff in a smoking jacket who owns a painting by Hitler; a self-confessed prudish housewife to a male porn star.
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But, please. Making them remain chained to each other 24/7 even while one of them defecates? Guys, we’re plumbing such new depths I think we’re gonna need a bigger submersible. The contestants could ask for a longer “poo chain” to endure this bodily function. My question is: who the hell wouldn’t ask for it? They also remained cuffed while taking a shower. What is it supposed to tell us about anything other than that the TV ideas bank is a vacuum? That the barrel is so scraped that all that remains are splinters.
Jonathan Ross, fresh from his stint on The Celebrity Traitors, is the host, although you would hardly know it since his job seems limited to being a sort of Cilla Black figure introducing the unlikely pairs on stage in a Blind Date parody, then doubtless swanning off for lunch. No one yet seems to have made the joke that their idea of hell is being chained to Ross, but give it time.
I was going to say the show’s fig leaf of respectability is so flimsy, they might as well just drop it and bare all. But actually that wouldn’t be entirely fair because the (shaky) premise — that the show will test people’s tolerance, show them what it’s like to walk in another’s shoes, learn to accept people who are different — did start to bear tiny fruit.
Tilly, who works as a cleaner and bartender in London and is unable to afford to leave her mother’s jolly, warm and chaotic home, began to see that her family life was much happier than that of her cuff-buddy, Anthony, who is a millionaire with a fleet of classic cars, but seems damaged by his cold, unfeeling father. At another stage Anthony begins to get his first understanding of how dispossessed and homeless people have to live.
But so much of it was contrived. The prude wore a blindfold while the porn star showered. If she’s a prude, why did she sign up to it? When Sir Ben, the toff, had a “plain speaking” dinner party at his ancestral home, one of the posho characters, his lips red from the fruits of the wine cellar, seemed to have been wheeled in straight from central casting. He was like Rowley Birkin from The Fast Show melded with Harry Enfield’s Tim Nice-but-Dim. Subtle this was not.
But, lo and behold, the acrimony delivered the show its money shot. Sir Ben, denied the use of his mobile phone by the producers, had a strop and demanded to be unchained from George. This was achieved with bolt cutters. Oh, who cares? You know who I would hate to be handcuffed to? Whoever dreamt up the idea for this tosh.
Jenny Agutter as Sister Julienne in Call the MidwifeBBC/Neal Street Productions/Luke Ross
As every veteran viewer knows, Call the Midwife (BBC1) is an accomplished deceiver. It presents as a cosy, nostalgic, sentimental Sunday-night drama about nuns in wimples, but in reality it is a radical subversive, an iron fist in a lambskin glove that frequently punches the viewer in the guts. It is a masterpiece of misdirection, smuggling hardcore and taboo subjects, such as backstreet abortion, child abuse and female genital mutilation into the 8pm cocoa-and-slippers slot using more than occasional tweeness and schmaltz as its disguise.
I admire it for making men watch the unairbrushed blood and guts reality of pushing a human the size of a small pumpkin out of one’s body. Sometimes there are three gory scenes of childbirth in a single episode. It is a kind of gentle genius.
But prepare to say goodbye to it, to Sister Julienne (Jenny Agutter) and the rest. At least for a while. After tomorrow night’s episode (its 139th and, by jove, it’s a weeper even by Call the Midwife’s hanky-drenching standards) it is taking a break, its first for 15 years. We probably won’t see another full series until the end of 2028. Given that it has been a dependable war horse and a Christmas Day staple, it will leave a big schedule hole for BBC1. It is one of those series that delivers the goods week in week out and, dare I say it, is perhaps a little taken for granted.
Anyone who saw last Sunday’s episode will know that big change is afoot in Poplar, London, with moves to close down the maternity home and Sister Monica Joan (Judy Parfitt) refusing to take her medication for kidney failure, instead choosing to leave things to God. “If you refuse your medication you will progress from chronic kidney disease to end-stage renal failure rapidly,” she was told. “And what if that is what the Lord intends?” she replied having already half checked out.
Trixie (Helen George), meanwhile, is being headhunted to work in a private clinic, while Veronica (Rebecca Gethings) is deciding whether to cast off her wimple and get herself a man to have a child of her own. It’s rare when Call the Midwife doesn’t make you cry and my Kleenex moment came when the father of little Susan (Emily Webb), whose mother was prescribed Thalidomide in pregnancy, attended his AA group and told of his fierce love for her. “I love her so much,” he said. “Every imperfection she has is beautiful to me.” It got me, that did.
Birth and death go hand in hand in this series — it’s the circle of life — and it won’t be hard to guess whom we might be mourning tomorrow evening. Enjoy the blubbing while you can because the taps will be turned off for a while.
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