I’d love to sit in on a trash-TV commissioning meeting. I imagine a spartan office space, some guys wired up on Pro Plus and Tangfastics, and a very hard deadline. I imagine them spitting out chains of nouns, names and activities, Alan Partridge pitching-style: “Swimming… crocodiles… Ben Fogle…”, “Jamie Theakston… dogs… flying planes…”, “Englefield House… dating… a Prince Harry lookalike…” This would continue until the room cried “Brilliant!” simultaneously.
Those are all real shows by the way (I Wanna Marry “Harry” was pulled from the air after just four episodes). And it is only by such a process that Handcuffed with Jonathan Ross could have been devised: “Handcuffs… Jonathan Ross… cash prize…” That’s the premise, right there. Nine pairs of polar-opposite people are handcuffed together for as long as they can stand. They sleep together, brush their teeth together, and there are some shower shots that I think would have given Lord Reith a coronary. (Though I’m a little bit fuzzy about how they all get dressed – you fundamentally can’t put two arms through a shirtsleeve.) There are keys to the handcuffs available wherever each pair go, should they be tempted to quit. The winners take home £100k, and they can wear ear defenders when they slag each other off to camera.
This being 2026, though, you can’t get away with direct cruelty or inanity any more. This is trash with a mission. We’re a riven country, Jonathan Ross tells us at the outset, and we need to speak to each other more. “Can a divided Britain settle its differences?” Only if its most distant social and cultural figures are forced into close and enforced bodily contact. Therefore, for “people from contrasting backgrounds”, read: these people have been specifically chosen to boil each other’s blood, and we won’t stop filming even when they start screaming, “Give me the fucking key!”
There’s a real element of social dialogue, or at least social exposure, or at least just good fun to be had here. Sir Benjamin Slade, 7th Baronet, is a fantastic find. He’s got a country pile besieged by peacocks, three dogs (called Nigel, Boris and Kwasi) and a landscape by Adolf Hitler on his wall. And I loved watching the Cockney, autodidact, former prison guard George go up against his toothless, plethoric mates over the dinner table, up to the point where Sir Ben, half-dressed and with his braces still hooked around his shrivelled torso, sends his butler for the bolt cutters. Then there’s Waitrose mum Charlie, forced to prepare a gooseberry and elderflower crumble with Rob – a massive, tattooed, gay porn star – attached to her wrist. Scenes like these feel like a new form of English surrealism.
But some of the participants seem like they’ve purely been chosen to drive their partner mad – because, most likely, they have. I never thought the self-described “fat, autistic, gay woman” Jo, who wears a T-shirt reading “Fat Bitch” and runs a plus-sized clothing company, would get on with Reuben, the self-described “fitness freak” and “alpha male”. However, that didn’t mean he needed to reveal himself to be such a colossal bell-end: “bigger” girls are often better in bed, he tells her, because they’re more “grateful”, minutes before she cuts him loose. Then there’s the sweet, patient Nina, a Christian hairdresser who’s been cuffed to Sara, who has ADHD. “You aren’t trans are you?” Sara asks hours after meeting. Nina manages a half-reply before the follow-up: “Were you born a woman?”
These people described themselves as a version of who they really are to get on this show, presumably lured by the money. (Some more so than others – Tilly, a 37-year-old barmaid and cleaner who lives with her mum, talks wistfully of using her share of the prize to rent a one-bed flat, while her multimillionaire partner says he is on a mission to restore the nation’s “manners”.)
Reality TV like this depends on a form of essentialisation, and this show, more than others, depends on a low and voyeuristic kind of caricature for the thrills it can provide. It’s a lovely vice to indulge, like scratching a nasty bite. But these people, isolated and confused and difficult and insensitive, shouldn’t be handled like this – used for the latest social experiment TV can dream up under a crap veneer of public interest. It’s the sort of thing you thought, 30 years after the dawn of reality TV, that audiences – and even the laziest commissioning editors – were bored with.
Handcuffed: Last Pair Standing
Channel 4
[Further reading: We know everything and nothing about Molly Russell]
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This article appears in the 04 Mar 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Trump's global terror
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