Friend or foe?
All TV has been getting steadily more cruel, and it is remarkable how much airtime is devoted to the unworthy pleasure of “showing people up”. Unpleasant dinner guests on The Dinner Party Inspectors, obnoxious brats on Young, Posh and Loaded and domestic slobs on How Clean is Your House? are all proffered for our amused disapproval.
Even the property shows do it. Five’s new run of House Doctor, for instance, opened with a woman crying when she learnt why her house, stuffed with her dolls and smelling of dog, could never sell. Other People’s Houses, starting on Channel 4 this Wednesday (8pm), invites us to tut-tut over a young couple’s poor makeover techniques.
Even so, Tiger Aspect productions must be rubbing their hands with anticipatory glee over their latest water-cooler atrocity, My New Best Friend, which begins on Channel 4 on Friday (11.10pm). The show is outrageous in such a peculiarly excruciating way that it is already provoking reactions.
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Of course, it’s all just a laugh, innit? An extended prank show in which willing volunteers have their capacity to cope with social embarrassment tested to breaking point. In each episode a “contestant” stands to win £10,000 if he or she can pass off a complete stranger as a long-lost best friend for a whole weekend. In practice it’s much more complicated than that. And much nastier.
The stranger, always played by comic Marc Wootton, has been personally tailored to represent their “worst nightmare”, the kind of person they would not normally be seen dead with. And they have to go along with whatever Wootton demands or lose the money.
In the first episode, Tim, a competitive, materialistic macho “lad”, is beset by Wootton disguised as “Stevie”, a flamboyantly gay social worker, who claims he was once Tim’s counsellor. Tim’s laddo friends find Stevie so infuriating on their Saturday “casino night” that one of them threatens to rip his face off if he doesn’t leave.
At Sunday lunch Stevie “outs” Tim as gay to two girlfriends. He isn’t, but plays along. Another contestant’s father is told his son has a secret love-child. Several of Wootton’s characters imply that the contestant has a strange secret past; all that they are somehow in thrall to this obnoxious and provocative figure. Wootton’s characters are desperately over-the-top. Most are silly stereotypes, but others are bizarre inventions of his own, which he sustains with gusto. He is a large, almost overbearing figure, and if the contestants aren’t writhing he pushes and pushes until they do. He seems to have the hide of a Challenger tank and a sadistic streak a yard wide running straight through his central nervous system.
The show should really be called “How My Friends and Family Would React if I Took Up with Someone Who’s a Borderline Certifiable Head Case”. The answer is, of course, that they would become uncomfortable, anxious, distressed and, in several cases, angry and aggressive. The show becomes, in effect, a perverse moral test, both for the contestant (one is persuaded to vandalise a car) and their nearest and dearest.
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But the nearest and dearest never asked to be put in such a situation and won’t win ten grand. Captions at the end suggest that some have been permanently alienated.
There are genuinely funny moments in My New Best Friend but an awful lot of it is just vile and not-so-subtly abusive. Tiger Aspect should be thrilled to bits.