In the UK: Tuesdays, 9pm, BBC3. Repeated 11.30pm, 2.25am; Sunday 8pm, 12.30am
In the US: Nowhere yet, but who knows. Maybe Discovery or BBC America
Anyone fancy a game of monkey tennis?
That if, you’ll recall, was one of Alan Partridge’s last-ditch pitches to a BBC commissioner in an attempt to get his own TV show. It’s easy to imagine a similar conversation taking place in Soho House, not so long ago, between a desperate producer, a little the worse for wear from white wine and 17 rejections, and a BBC3 commissioner looking for new shows.
“Anthropology Agro!” suggests the tipsy prod. “We send six buff men around the world. They meet all sorts of tribes and cultures. They learn about their lifestyles and their customs. Then they pick fights with them.”
“Hmm,” muses the somewhat patronising BBC3 commissioner. “We are the BBC. We are supposed to be educational and informative. Except we’re BBC3. We’re watched by chavs and morons and Torchwood fans – who are both chavs and morons. The only way we’re going to get our target demographic of XYZ9s to be interested in another country and its culture is by sticking it in an XBox360 first-person shooter backdrop and making sure there are plenty of naked tribeswomen in it.”
Decided, she exclaims, “Brilliant! You’re hired” and Last Man Standing is born.
Except, it’s the BBC. It’s too liberal to be sending the prime of British youth around the world to beat up the natives. That’s too Raj, too Empire. We can’t do that anymore.
So they’ve stuck in a couple of provisos.
- Three of the six buff young athletes have to be American
- They all have to be bollocks at fighting
Continue reading “Review: Last Man Standing 1×1”
