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2 hours ago
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What is The Box? It is easier, perhaps, to list the things The Box is not, if only to give ourselves something to cling to when the more recognisable trappings start to wobble, the floor gives way and we find ourselves in a tent with Joey Essex, watching in silence as a topless John Bercow hurls glitter at an audience of braying pensioners.
So. Some things The Box is not: a sitcom; a medical drama; a property show presented by sockless men with teeth that follow you around the room; a thing about badgers. Beyond this, however, we are on our own. The opening titles do little to assist. “10 BOXES” booms a caption as the camera swoops over a collection of giant yellow containers strapped to the back of a flatbed lorry. “10 CONTESTANTS” it continues, as a montage of coming attractions reveals footage of Graeme Souness squinting at an egg and a member of JLS running towards some trees. And, finally, a distinctly disobliging caption that is nevertheless pivotal to the wilfully befuddling modus operandi of this six-part series: “NO HELP”. Bloody hell. Or rather, “bløødy hell”, because The Box is a Norwegian format so something may have been lost in translation. Anyway, shh, because it’s episode one and here is Gary Lineker.
“Boxes,” he says, peering through his binoculars at 10 yellow boxes. Inside them, we learn, are a corresponding number of trembling minor celebrities. “Remember,” adds our host, chuckling mildly in a jumper the colour of patio, “the celebrities have no idea where they are or what they’re supposed to be doing!”
Tiny cameras capture the mood of the interned stars as they sweat and fidget in their metal tombs. “I don’t like surprises,” gulps broadcaster Ranvir Singh. “I’m in a state of unparalleled uncertainty,” confesses the former speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow. “I’m Joey Essex,” bellows Joey Essex, pounding on the walls of his box like a distressed navvy trapped in an overflowing portable toilet.
Finally, the doors of the containers slide open and they – and indeed we – are off. But where? And to what end?
As the opening captions state, there is no help and few instructions for the contestants. Instead, they must “work together” to “solve challenges” such as finding hexagons to fit into hexagon-shaped holes and completing an egg and spoon race in a set amount of time. Then they are divided into teams before being sent back to a custom-made house. Then one of them is eliminated. There is no prize.
“One thing’s for sure,” gasps JLS singer JB Gill, “The Box is absolutely unknown!” Alas, this is balls. The only certainty here is that the boxes are pointless, their sole purpose being to briefly conceal contestants from their location, a task that could just as easily be achieved with a blindfold made out of old tights.
This would, however, deny us the sight of Essex bursting out of his box like a frightened horse at Epsom, or a boxed-in Danny “I’m a content creator” Aarons shouting about how he “can’t hear the skies” while frantically thrashing his horrifying Norman-era bowl cut from side to side like a one-man Battle of Hastings. So boxes it is.
Unlike, say, Taskmaster, where chaotic things happen for a reason, here, chaotic things happen for no reason and continue to happen long past the point at which either their chaotic methods or pointlessness would make some sort of sense on a conceptual level. The second episode, for instance, ends with a genuinely harrowing sing-off that climaxes with Bercow performing a rendition of Pink’s So What, while a tentful of holidaymakers aggressively demand he remove his shirt.
The Box isn’t so much a gameshow as a sustained howl of existential confusion. A gameshow that scoffs in the face of convention yet seems bewildered by the bedlam that such showmanship inevitably unleashes. A gameshow in which John Bercow bellows “Orderrrrrr!” while showing us his nipples.
I commend it to the house.
