Chronic self-importance is the Achilles heel of Ireland’s Fittest Family, a backyard muck-about masquerading as a tribal showdown. The athleticism on display is impressive, but the accompanying bombast is wearisome — a distraction for contestants and an irritant to the audience.
Obstacle courses are the show’s trademark challenge. Competing clans advance by climbing across, crawling under, swinging off and sliding down a dizzying array of fiendish obstructions. Most contestants fail at first, but the pluckiest bounce back so they can fail again. Tellingly, the one big stumbling block that everyone manages to get over is the sheer silliness of the pursuits in which they are so breathlessly engaged.
Shouting at the top of one’s lungs seems to be regarded as the best means of drowning out inconvenient realities — and encouraging peak performance. Ireland’s Fittest Family is presented as a showcase for physical strength and endurance, but the series is actually a loudhailer for verbal shape-throwing; the running at the mouth is of Olympic Games standard.
Everybody roars at everybody else, almost incessantly. The heated exchanges frequently become enraged flameouts. As a result, the atmosphere on this would-be celebration of familial teamwork is often indistinguishable from that of an especially rancourous episode of EastEnders.
The loudest, brashest hecklers are the, ahem, “sporting legends” who serve as celebrity coaches: Davy Fitzgerald, Anna Geary, Alan Quinlan and newcomer Stephen Hunt. Fitzgerald is renowned for insult-hurling on the ditch but, in his GAA guise, his sideline rants can be marvels of improvised vituperation and profane eloquence. Here, however, the mentors’ “outbursts” are delivered primarily for the benefit of the cameras, robbed of punch, edge and personality by their self-conscious staginess.
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The doggedly uninspiring nature of the coaches’ pep talks is a longstanding problem, but it has become a serious deadweight in a season when the ratio of yakety-yak to derring-do has worsened considerably. More time than is devoted to tedious sermons about discipline, excellence, dedication and suchlike, most of which say nothing. Imagine The Voice of Ireland with a coaching panel made up of Unas, and you get the picture.
Motivational speeches are supposed to be rousing expressions of hard-won wisdom but, on the lips of cliché merchants, they’re robotic recitations of clapped-out buzzwords. “Positivity and work ethic will bring us home,” says Quinlan. Like most of those who claim to be graduates from the sporting academy of hard knocks, the coaches also have a childlike fondness for rinky-dink rhymes. “No pain, no gain,” says Hunt.
Last Sunday, we reached the penultimate stage of this year’s tournament as four families battled for three places in tonight’s final. For weeks, mentors have been urging their teams to “get stuck in” and this advice was finally heeded as the players plunged into bog holes — and got stuck in them. The Bog Jog, a combination of roadway dash and swampland dive, brought out the worst in the contestants. Mired in marsh and masked by mud, some resorted to dragging down their opponents. The shouldering, elbowing and shirt-pulling were ferocious, an eye-opener for anyone who thought sporting families abide by a nobler code of sportsmanship.
There are things to like about Ireland’s Fittest Family. Even a couch potato can appreciate the mettle shown by the families as they clamber up walls or wade through lakes that saner folk would walk around. There’s also an appealing simplicity about the venture’s mechanics.
At first glance, the series looks like a bold attempt to strip sport back to its raw essentials. The terrain on which the early rounds take place alternates between quarry and farmland, dirt track and field. The challenges are defiantly lo-fi; there are cross-country runs and log-carrying contests. Despite its gritty aspects, the show’s structure is rigidly formulaic. Each hour-long edition barely contains 15 minutes of “action”; everything else is prattle and posturing. All trace of individuality is bleached from the contestants early on. Even the poses they adopt when standing together — arms folded, chins ajut — emphasise their identikit uniformity.
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The show is fronted with shouty melodrama by Mairead Ronan, who provides a useful service by spelling out what’s going on during the many moments when even the players seem lost. But, like almost everything about the series, her role is overblown. Ronan’s habit of swooping in immediately after every challenge to ask how the hyperventilating protagonists are feeling is particularly pointless.
Family entertainment is a difficult trick for TV producers to pull off in an era when every member of a household can be on a separate screen, as well as a different wavelength. Ireland’s Fittest Family has many of the required moves but lacks the confidence to avoid going through the motions. Ironically, it’s the show’s overeagerness to talk itself up that gives the game away.
■ Ireland’s Fittest Family | RTE1, Sun