What do you want from a game show? To have your brain – and patience – tested? Watch The Chase. To have your ego massaged gently with easy wins? Catchphrase. Chaos, Cup-a-Soup, Uncle Ben’s and inflatable bananas? Supermarket Sweep. Weird prizes? Generation Game.
Cash prizes? Million Pound Drop, Who Wants to be a Millionaire… and now BBC1’s The Wall, the aim of which is best explained by its unlikely host, Danny Dyer: “Just give us loads of readies, ya mug!”
Dyer is a card: reliably hysterical and outrageous comedy value whenever a camera is put in front of him – which is most of the time.
His credit roll includes The Real Football Factories, Deadliest Men, I Believe in UFOs, an enduring stint behind the bar on EastEnders, the most phenomenal episode of Who Do You Think You Are? ever recorded – followed by endless succeeding media exploiting his royal lineage – and last year’s Brexit rant on Good Evening Britain, in which he branded David Cameron a “twat”. “Where is the geezer? In Nice with his trotters up.”
Such is the magnetic pull of his charisma and unpredictable, well, gob, many I know would now claim, “I’d watch Danny Dyer do anything.” Well, will they watch him help pairs of contestants attempt to win cash from a U-shaped board of lights, with the voice of Angela Rippon – whom Dyer frequently calls “baby” – which operates like a sort of giant Kerplunk?
I’m not sure – especially when, in the post-Strictly, pre-watershed slot of 8.35pm, Dyer’s freewheeling unfiltered brilliance is gagged.
Read more:
Danny Dyer interview: ‘I was in such a dark place. I thought I was going to die’
He is allowed a few stock cockney phrases – he calls the possible answers to a multiple-choice question – “Kim Kardashian”, “Kim Cattrall” and “Kim Jong-un” – “a nutty three-ball”. (Of the last, he flirts with the studio audience: “I always hated him, didn’t you?”) But that’s as risky as it gets.
Contestants are split up, one answering questions, the other shoving a glowing lunar orb down a bowling chute before it plops down the “Wall”, letting gravity guide it into one of several pots determining how much money is at stake. Dyer addresses “Wall” like it’s a person and asks the audience, “Is it about to take a liberty?”
The show promises “heart-stopping jeopardy”, but mostly the contestant dealing with the balls – cue the innuendo – runs at the Wall, screeching up at it as the ball trickles down, willing for an earthquake to tilt the room and force it into a four-figure hole, all the while looking like someone locked out, drunk, calling into their partner’s window for them to wake up and let them in.
It’s not about the drama, the gambles or the cash, all we really want at home is a laugh, and to play along ourselves
On Sunday, I spent six hours watching the Challenge channel. Family Fortunes, Take your Pick, Catchphrase and Bullseye. I started to wonder whether the Saturday night game show is a dying art.
Pointless is one that works: its odd concept that rewards superfluous knowledge, its simple rules and its rapid question rate make it just the right level of challenging, and straightforward fun.
But watching those retro series – in particular, Les Dennis chewing the fat with his contestants – it seems there is none of that relaxed, tongue-in-cheek naughtiness any more, and not enough delight in the naff. Too many series expect high production budgets, complicated rules and a starry host to do the hard work.
The Wall squanders Dyer’s glittering talents – which could have been let loose in that studio of febrile pandemonium – by having him read from an autocue. It’s not sharp enough, not weird enough and not really fun enough, either.
It’s not about the urgent drama, the gambles or the cash. Who cares if a stranger on TV wins enough money for a trip to Australia? All we really want at home is a laugh, and to play along ourselves.