I’ve had a good idea. Let’s apply for a moratorium on new reality shows, at least until the frenzied desire for a challenger to The Traitors’ crown is over. Otherwise they’re just going to keep happening.
The Neighbourhood – presented by Graham Norton, its saving grace – is the latest to throw its cap into the ring. Six families take up residence in a suburban close (the neighbourhood, you get it) and each is aiming to be the last one voted out and thus claim the uncustomarily large pot of £250,000. This at least suggests that someone in the TV commissioning offices is beginning to understand the concept of inflation and the truth that yer 50 or 100ks are no longer universally life-changing amounts of money but closer to being a month’s rent or the price of a tank of petrol.
The rules for surviving in the neighbourhood are spectacularly simple, almost as if the people in charge were exhausted before they began and/or couldn’t afford to hire new blood after allocating the entire budget to the prize fund. We may never know, or care.
There are daily – say it with me now – challenges that earn the winners … immunity, that’s right! From “removal” in this case, as “eviction” was presumably deemed too harsh a term. For the first, a member of each family is strapped on to a 7ft washing line and has to grab an item off it and read a fact stitched therein about one of the other people they have just met and guess to whom it applies. This is pointless and dismal and everyone squeals and whoops. The second challenge involves them all searching for gnomes. This is slightly less dismal. Always be gnome-hunting is not bad advice for life.
Beyond that, the families must make …? Alliances, yes, while also assuring their relatives and viewers that they never forget that at the end of the day they are playing a game and although they are actually very kind people they are also very competitive and came here to win, their superpower is “being underestimated” and they intend to “smash it” because they came here to win.
The inaugural set of households includes the Bradons from Essex (their big question – does being a five-strong team make them look like more of a threat?); Sunita and Tony Kandola and her son Samra (is Sunita’s immediate sharing of samosas with her neighbours the sign of a dangerously sophisticated gameplan?); the Lozman-Sturrocks (including son Jordan, on whom more later); the Pescuds (who harbour a secret astrophysicist now working in Greggs, which occasions further hysterical threat assessment); the Scousa Haus (Liverpudlian twins Lyndsey and Louise and Lyndsey’s girlfriend Rosie); and four puppies masquerading as students, known as the Uni Boys. They bounce around their house so happily they should be administered as national tonic.
Emotive backstories are gradually revealed, of course. The Lozman-Sturrock family have grown close over stepdad Dave’s recent health issues and the twins want the money to help their terminally ill mother tick things off her bucket list. And Jordan L-S was in the military, which left him with PTSD and he now does standup comedy to raise money for men’s mental health charities. How much this is all meant to explain or excuse his indefatigable desire to sabotage every possible relationship with other competitors despite alliances, at least in the early stages, being the only way to survive, remains unclear by the end of the two episodes – of 11! – available for review. “I’m bored of playing happy families!” he announces roughly 40 seconds after having been briefly civil to Rosie. “It’s time to start stabbing people in the back.” Is this a sign that he was a very good soldier or a very bad one? I’m intrigued.
By the rest of it, less so. Any sense of jeopardy is conspicuous by its absence. Norton lifts the energy when he’s there but is only present for the welcome and removals-voting. The contestants are largely a charisma-free bunch, and the only one that isn’t is evicted early, with a suggestion of underlying racism that everyone works very hard to ignore.
Yes, a moratorium, I think, is in order. TV commissioners and whatever the proper name for formatters is, take some time out. Rest. Recharge. Put the university puppies on in the meantime, and don’t rush back.
The Neighbourhood aired on ITV1 and is on ITVX now.