Seeing Joe Wicks on the small screen can be, to use a modern term, triggering. It\u2019s not his fault \u2014 he was there every morning during lockdown doing his burpees and his crunches and we were there with our kids hoping his exercise routines could be vicarious. Five years on, we would like to forget about those times but here he is trying to make Britain healthy again \u2026 again.<\/p>\n
The premise of Joe Wicks: Licensed to Kill (Channel 4, Mon) was a good one, though. With the help of Chris van Tulleken, the doctor who wrote the bestseller Ultra-Processed People, Wicks set about making and marketing a protein bar. He used ingredients that can cause dementia, cancer, stroke, obesity, type 2 diabetes, diarrhoea and premature death, which doesn\u2019t sound and certainly didn\u2019t look appealing, but these are the same ingredients the ultra-processed food industry uses routinely. <\/p>\n
Add a little cacao and orange flavouring to the industrial gloop and the Killer bar was ready to go. Why? Wicks wanted to show how bad ultra-processed food is, how easy (and legal) it is to pass it off as healthy and then, having sold 3,000 of his bars, force the government into regulatory action.<\/p>\n
Then Wicks had second thoughts. Was it wise to sell food with potentially life-shortening side-effects to the unsuspecting public? Van Tulleken was convinced. \u201cIf you run this only as a thought experiment you\u2019ll be doing what I\u2019ve been doing for the last ten years and I guarantee nothing will change,\u201d he told Wicks. \u201cYou\u2019ve convinced me,\u201d Wicks said, but he hadn\u2019t. <\/p>\n
The resulting product had a buff, healthy Wicks on one side and a dying Wicks on the other, the Grim Reaper hovering on his shoulder. As the first episode ended he was preparing to take the bars to market, but with labelling (and an accompanying press pack) that made it clear what was going on.<\/p>\n
We can\u2019t blame Wicks for bottling it. He\u2019s got a nice, big influencer empire and a nice, big house, both of which were on display. \u201cThe Body Coach\u2019s health bars can kill you\u201d is not a headline he wants to read. Except it is, isn\u2019t it? <\/p>\n
As Wicks and Van Tulleken illustrated, 60 per cent of the national diet is highly processed. Supermarket shelves are full of these deadly products. Could he not have sold his bars and only then told his customers what they had eaten, given that what they had eaten was the same as what they usually eat? Probably not \u2014 he already lost thousands of social-media followers after the well signposted stunt became public. <\/p>\n
Clearly we don\u2019t like being sold food that could kill us if the person selling us the food is doing it to make an important point. If they are doing it to make a profit, though? Fine. Mad.<\/p>\n
Television historians and random posters on Reddit are unsure which programme first had the bright idea of doing a celebrity version. It might have been Family Fortunes or Bullseye. If you apply strict criteria such as it has to have the word \u201ccelebrity\u201d in the title, it could have been Big Brother. It doesn\u2019t matter, though. It happened and now it feels as if every game show, reality show and show in which people sell stuff has to have a celebrity version. <\/p>\n
\u2022 Joe Wicks: My fight against UPFs and why fat jabs aren\u2019t the answer<\/a><\/p>\n You have watched ordinary people try it, now bring in the celebrities with their better clothes, better hair, better teeth, better camera awareness \u2014 just better. It\u2019s television\u2019s class system and it makes me want to vote for the Trots.<\/p>\n Most of the first half of the first episode of The Celebrity Traitors (BBC1, Wed, Thu) felt like an advert for Land Rover interrupted occasionally by \u201csleb\u201d introductions. Because this is the first celebrity edition there are some quite good ones (Celia Imrie, Jonathan Ross, Joe Marler), some quite ubiquitous ones (Tom Daley, Stephen Fry, Paloma Faith) and some quite Clare Balding ones (Clare Balding). <\/p>\n There was just enough self-awareness on display to make it watchable \u2014 Ross has always wanted to kill a celebrity, Daley might do it with his knitting needles and so on. And of course the host Claudia Winkleman, all catwalk Rocky Horror, treads the line between farce and suspense expertly. Did I say suspense? I did because, spoiler alert, that\u2019s what there was when Alan Carr was given the task of murdering a faithful in plain sight. <\/p>\n As a parlour game Traitors is presumably more fun to play than watch, except that watching Carr, consumed by nerves, trying badly to pull off a poisoning, much to the frustration of his perfectly poised co-conspirator Cat Burns, was gripping, dammit. It even made up for the bit where Balding had to pull a horse up a hill. So now I\u2019m hooked.<\/p>\n It\u2019s the first series of Worlds Apart (Channel 4, Tue), in which pensioners are paired with young people to complete challenges around Japan, so we had to make do without celebs. Can two generations bridge the gap and work as one? <\/p>\n It\u2019s a nice idea \u2014 people named Colin and Barbara paired with people named Aaron and Tende trying to navigate not only the culture shock of Tokyo but also the realisation that these old\/young people might have their uses. You can feel the hand of the producers \u2014 of course they have picked these people carefully \u2014 but away with the cynicism. I found it heartwarming.<\/p>\n \u2022 Read more TV reviews, guides about what to watch and interviews<\/a><\/p>\n Frauds (ITV1, Sun, Mon), on the other hand, not so much. Because it\u2019s on ITV we get the everything-including-the-kitchen-sink approach to drama. It\u2019s a heist movie. It\u2019s a buddy comedy. It\u2019s about redemption. It\u2019s about life after a diagnosis of terminal illness. It\u2019s about girl power, coercive control and addiction. It\u2019s the lot. <\/p>\n Jodie Whittaker continues to try hard not to be the Doctor and largely succeeds as one half of a conwoman outfit. Suranne Jones is covered in prison tats but is otherwise Suranne Jones with a few good lines such as: \u201cLive, laugh, love? Die, hate, cry, more like.\u201d (I thought that was original until I noticed it\u2019s available on a pillowcase online.) Over the remaining episodes, as they plan to steal The Great Masturbator by Salvador Dal\u00ed, no teachable moment will be untaught and no exposition left unexposed. And I\u2019ll continue to watch it, but only during the long ad breaks on Motorway Cops. <\/p>\n Rod Liddle is away<\/p>\n What have you enjoyed on television recently? Let us know in the comments below<\/p>\n Love TV? Discover the best shows on Netflix<\/a>, the best Prime Video TV shows<\/a>, the best Disney+ shows<\/a> , the best Apple TV+ shows<\/a>, the best shows on BBC iPlayer<\/a> , the best shows on Sky and Now<\/a>, the best shows on ITVX<\/a>, the best shows on Channel 4<\/a> streaming, the best shows on Paramount+<\/a> and our favourite hidden gem TV shows<\/a>. Don\u2019t forget to check our critics\u2019 choices to what to watch this week<\/a> and browse our comprehensive TV guide<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Seeing Joe Wicks on the small screen can be, to use a modern term, triggering. 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