Is the future of TV Freddie and Paddy shouting over old shows? Let's hope not

One thing about the passage of time is that it’s very hard to know what your era is going to be defined by while you’re still in it. Think about now: you know what haircuts people have, the T-shirt trends they wear and stuff like that – you know what 2020 feels like and looks like, because you’re living in it. But society won’t have enough distance from the year 2020 to make a pastiche film set in 2020 until our tastes have changed enough to notice. That’s roughly when we’ll know which cultural signifiers will stand the test of time: our equivalent of a Walkman, a Miami Vice sleeve-roll or an armful of Madonna bangles.

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Scientists haven’t worked out how many years it takes for the actual reality of an era to wear off and hindsight to kick in, but I have a working theory, and that is: 11 human years. That’s how long it’s taken us to look at footage of Richard Hammond’s haircut in 2009 and go: “That is not what society needs right now. No. Delete that.”

Or at least that’s what I assume the BBC is up to. With Total Wipeout: Freddie & Paddy Takeover (Saturday, BBC One), they’ve revived that You’ve Been Framed/obstacle course mash-up show that was a popular teatime entertainment about a decade ago, only they’ve cut Richard Hammond out, and put the voices of Jacamo Ultras Paddy McGuinness and Freddie Flintoff in. To be clear: this is the same footage as before – the same middle-managers bouncing off huge red balls, the same twin brothers from Hull racing through mud – it’s just Paddy McGuinness and Freddie Flintoff are now the ones going “Oof!” over the top of it.

No, I’m not quite sure who it’s for, either. My first thought when I don’t understand TV is just to assume it’s for children – I don’t know what watching TV with a child is like, but I figure it’s just Doctor Who and Frozen on an infinite loop until everyone on the sofa hates each other – and watching people pratfall off an obstacle course into pool water in Argentina seems semi-kid-friendly. But then I can’t imagine the patter between McGuinness and Flintoff – a woeful who-can-do-the-most-cartoon-northern-accent bout of one-upmanship, often descending into barely audible Flintoff laughter as a stay-at-home mum goes crotch-first on to an eliminator wheel – is terribly good to watch with an eight-year-old. And I don’t think any working-brain adult would enjoy Freddie and Paddy – hereby “Fraddy” – doing their Now That’s What I Call Banter! either. So I’m stumped.

In the early aughts – a time just before Richard Hammond got into having three haircuts at once – I became briefly obsessed with late-night repeats of Takeshi’s Castle, voiced as they were by an almost cacklingly bewildered Craig Charles. This was a format that worked – a baffling Japanese battle royale, punctuated by people running full-pelt into locked doors, every episode ending in confusion, no one (least of all Charles) knowing who, if anyone, had won. Maybe that gives some insight into who this is for, then: teenagers with vampiric sleeping patterns, chain-watching old repeats of it some years into the future on an obscure Freeview channel when no one else in the house is awake. That is my best guess, because it’s not fit for viewing by anyone else.