Gladiators was never good TV

I’m sure there’s a Portuguese word which describes ‘enforced nostalgia for a thing you never enjoyed in the first place’. Whatever it is, it applies in spades to BBC1’s reboot of Gladiators, which we’re now told was one of the landmarks of 1990s Saturday TV entertainment but which I don’t recall fondly one bit, despite having a child who would have been just the right age to enjoy it.

What I do remember was the desperate contrivance of it all. The Fawn, I recall, was invited to go with our boy the Rat to write up a feature on the very first show and interview the stars. She came back traumatised. Her head throbbed with Queen’s excruciating ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ thumping on auto-repeat; she kept having flashbacks to nightmare visions of giant foam hands thrusting towards the girders of some remote, garishly lit indoor arena; worst of all, though, was the unutterable, grinding boredom.