Time Crashers
Sunday, Channel 4
Channel 4 bosses must be kicking themselves that they didn’t get their flagship immersive history series Time Crashers out sooner, allowing the BBC to get in there first with 24 Hours in the Past. The two are remarkably similar, with groups of celebrities “sent back in time” to experience life in a different era — and once you’ve seen one group of celebs in peasant clothing shovelling dung, you’ve seen them all.
That said, there was much to admire in Channel 4’s version, with much credit going to the casting directors, who managed to book an entertaining bunch of celebrities, many of whom you will actually have heard of.
Thrown back to 1588 to work as servants in a grand Elizabethan manor house were the former Cheers star Kirstie Alley, the Olympic gold medallist Greg Rutherford, the actor Keith Allen, the ex-footballer Jermaine Jenas and the former breakfast host Fern Britton.
Also on board was the Team GB weightlifter Zoe Smith, who at the beginning was promising to throw herself in at the deep end and get stuck in before she was faced with stripping a boar’s face from its skull, sewing up its nostrils and stuffing it with sausagemeat. “I have a hard time getting a chicken breast out of a packet,” she confessed before breaking down. We were only 11 minutes in and we had our first tears.
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This was hardcore history, no cosy Celebrity Big Brother house. To reinforce that point and to give legitimacy to the experiment, the newly knighted Tony Robinson and the archaeologist Dr Cassie Newland were on hand with fascinating nuggets of information such as, “An Elizabethan feast could cost hundreds of thousands of pounds in today’s money,” or, “In Elizabethan times you had to remove your hat while urinating even in the company of animals.” Who knew?
At times it resembled an Elizabethan-themed edition of MasterChef as the celebrities prepared a 20-course banquet. Rutherford struggled with his cockenthrice (half pig, half goose, stitched together), Britton struggled with her sweet treats and Smith struggled to keep anything down, while the Elizabethan answer to Gregg Wallace buzzed around warning the celebs that they must get it right or else. Cooking really doesn’t get much tougher than this.
In the end, the feast went down a storm and our critics went home happy, but what did all this teach us? Well, we learnt that Meg Matthews employs a chef, a cleaner and a dog walker and goes by the job title of “socialite”; that human urine is handy for getting stubborn stains out of soiled nightwear; that Kirstie Alley is as funny in real life as on screen; that Fern Britton snores like a banshee and that life in Elizabethan England was hard and filthy and relentless and we should all be very pleased with ourselves that we were born in more enlightened times.
We also learnt that a show that could have been open to ridicule and easily dismissed as yet another pointless celebrity vehicle actually turned out to be a lot of fun. I’m already looking forward to a spot of medieval jousting next week.
mike.mulvihill@thetimes.co.uk