Fairly desperate: BBC1’s Unbreakable reviewed

On first impression, you might have thought that Unbreakable was just a fairly desperate reality show cobbled together from I’m a Celebrity, Mr and Mrs, Taskmaster and It’s a Knockout. After all, the format is that people of varying degrees of fame – from Simon Weston to, er, the bloke who presents MTV’s Celebs on the Farm – arrive with their partners at what presenter Rob Beckett calls ‘a big posh gaff in the country’. Once there, they’re made to perform a series of game-like tasks as Rob looks on and guffaws.

Naturally, the series does make a few cunning tweaks to its obvious forebears. Unlike in Taskmaster, for example, some of the tasks are extremely boring. Unlike Stuart Hall, Rob has yet to perfect the art of sounding genuinely amused when somebody falls into some water – rather than, say, stuck with a job that will soon have him making an angry call to his agent. But naturally, too, the familiar traits of the dodgy lookalike celeb show are firmly in place: among them, the constant reminders of what tremendous fun we’re having, the clever use of Grieg’s ‘Morning’ to signify morning, and the abiding sense that the whole thing has been made to supply clips for Gogglebox. (Cue the bungee jump.)

Except that this is not how Unbreakable sees itself at all. As befits its otherwise baffling BBC1 status, it’s apparently a programme with a serious purpose: to discover and pass on ‘the secrets of a strong relationship’. And to prove it, Rob is joined by two authorities on the subject. One is the improbably telegenic ‘relationship psychologist’ Anjula Mutanda, whose credentials were briskly established in Thursday’s opening episode by shots of her in an armchair holding a clipboard.