James Walton

Fairly desperate: BBC1’s Unbreakable reviewed

Plus: on ITV Jeremy Paxman explains, without blubbing, what it's like to live with Parkinson's

That bloke who presents MTV’s Celebs on the Farm and his partner in BBC1's Unbreakable. Image: BBC / 110% Content / Pete Dadds 
issue 08 October 2022

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.

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