Big Brother, Challenge Anneka, Fantasy Football League and even Gladiators all making a comeback? Sorry, I'm just not 'ready' for that – Aidan Smith

As the son of a BBC producer I did not grow up in a house where ITV was banned, but could sense my parents’ disappointment whenever they found me watching the commercial network.

TV's Gladiators in all their muscle-plated, spandexed glory, and now due for a revival on the BBC (Picture: PA)

Unabashed, I enjoyed the third channel – next to the big, important, serious Beeb, a lot of the programmes were brash, sexy and fun – and still do now. But I did become a bit of a snob and reckoned I could spot an ITV show, one that only it could contrive, a mile off.

Such a moment was 30 years ago this October. A new Saturday night production was airing for the first time and had only been running for about 15 minutes when I nipped round to the corner shop. I could tell from her blaring TV that a neighbour was watching and, even this early in the proceedings, she was enraptured. “Come on, Wolf!” she yelled. “Batter him!”

The show was of course Gladiators – over-muscled men and pneumatic women in spray-on spandex being challenged by brawny lads and lassies to duels with giant cotton buds. My neighbour’s undiscerning gaze probably had me smirking to myself: “How very ITV.” And when the nonsense ended – on 1 January, 2000 – I might have added: “How very 1990s – how very last century.”

But “Contenders... ready! Gladiators... ready!” - it’s coming back. What’s more, on the BBC. The programme is one of a glut of scheduled reboots from the same period in televisual history including Big Brother, Challenge Anneka and Fantasy Football League.

What does this mean? Maybe that these shows were the weekly must-sees of the current generation of commissioning editors when they were at their most impressionable. Either that or the ideas cupboards are bare and this is the start of TV’s death spiral.

Perhaps there’s a post-lockdown influence at work here. Fantasy Football League was sofa-based and for the best part of two years that was all of us. And of course Big Brother was essentially a prison. The occupants couldn’t leave.

Their lives became an interminable series of tiny, tedious rituals. Pacing round and round like zoo animals in too-small enclosures, they got angry with each other and went crackers. But do we really want to sit down and watch, incessantly, a programme which reminds us of the dark days and darker nights of Covid?

The fetish for remaking or bringing back old shows is not new and, indeed, not always unwelcome. When, for instance, Friends and Cold Feet, which also originated in the 1990s, re-appeared on screens, audiences seemed pleased to be connecting once again with characters who connected with each other in the old-fashioned way, eg in pubs and coffee-shops. In the social media age, this seemed quaint and charming.

But the latest batch of revivals has been criticised by TV bosses. “We’re in a microwave moment,” Channel 4’s Ian Katz told the Edinburgh TV Festival, “with so many old dishes being reheated.”

Gladiators and Big Brother have been subject to most of the consternation, and with good reason, for their disinterments are as depressing as they are baffling.

Big Brother was created in Holland in 1997 and arrived here three years later. It was weird, disturbing, apocalyptic television. How could the art history series Civilisation and a live feed of hairdressers and self-employed builders in a hot-tub arguing about whose turn it was to wash the dishes have possibly emerged from the same medium?

Here was a literal interpretation of fly-on-the-wall TV – insects in vertical pursuit was sometimes all that was actually happening – but while viewers might wonder now if they were being played and Big Brother was a massive joke at their expense, the show did seem for a while at least to be a smart social experiment, a fascinating anthropological study.

And then the housemates got too smart, too knowing, too narcissistic, too aware of the cameras and too greedy in pursuit of fame and that’s when Big Brother’s voyeuristic allure dimmed.

Celebrity Big Brother confirmed that famous folk were no better at coping with confinement but there were unforgettable moments born out of, truly, the most improbable of friendships. Whoever would have imagined that political maverick George Galloway, basketball wild man Dennis Rodman and Pete “Dead or Alive” Burns could get along so winningly?

But then that edition got boring, too, and I really can’t see how Big Brother, in whatever format, fits into the telly landscape any more. Every subsequent reality show owes it a debt but if ever there was a programme that was of its time it’s this one.

Gladiators didn’t really fit into the telly landscape of the 1990s, remembering how camp, clunky and cartoony it was. But I suppose the previous decade was when everyone joined a gym and all that preening and grunting in front of floor-to-ceiling mirrors required some sort of outlet. It was like pantomime with pecs, It’s a Knockout with big, backcombed hair.

Wolf, you might remember, was the panto villain, the baddest Gladiator, while others included Cobra, Hunter, Lightning, Gerbil, Newt, Doily, Windcheater and Mince. Okay, some of these might be made up, but what about the threat to the new version posed by a right couple of killjoys, Health & Safety – won’t stricter rules ruin the thrills?

The Shock of the New was another art history series from the golden age of the BBC but the corporation digging up Gladiators is just the shlock of the old. I really can’t think who might be the target audience here – unless this is a lowbrow sop to the Beeb-bashing Nadine Dorries, surely the worst Secretary for Culture there’s ever been.