The actor Mrs Patrick Campbell once told the playwright (and her friend) George Bernard Shaw that, when he was a little boy, someone should have told him to hush, just once. I feel that a similar message, delivered with the same firm but loving kindness, should be delivered to the makers of 007: The Road to a Million. Not every reality show idea has to be brought to fruition. Not even if it comes with Barbara Broccoli’s blessing and some name-brand recognition. You could say no, just once.
The tenuously James-Bond-affiliated premise is this: nine couples – friends, married pairs, sisters, brothers, a father and son – have the chance to win £1m each by answering a series of questions. To find the questions, they have to travel round the globe undertaking a series of Bond-lite challenges and – for extra thrills – pull open the ring tab on a smoke canister to find out if their answer was right. Green smoke, advance to the next country and question; red smoke, off home you pop.
They all start in Scotland, yomping up hills and into lochs in unsuitable clothing – I imagine the Hebridean mountain rescue team sitting at home watching with their heads in their hands – because no one has realised that there is a difference between formulaic (a satisfying base upon which to build intrigue in a genre film) and repetitive.
Then they head into continental Europe to run around Italy and Spain in bad shorts while pestering locals for directions to places they cannot remember or pronounce (alas for Bond’s cosmopolitan suavity). After that, they travel to more far-flung locales such as Jamaica and Brazil to do the same – but in lagoons instead of lochs.
The challenges have about 17 stages each before you get to the (multiple choice) question. The answer is then drawn out for about half an episode, in case the momentum was in any danger of building. To be fair, sometimes it is – usually when the challenge involves a boxful of snakes, a poorly caged tarantula or a yardful of crocodiles standing between the couple and their latest heavily secured silver suitcase full of promise. There are a few effortful attempts at building backstory and empathy for the competitors (the father apologies to his son for working away on the oil rigs for so much of the boy’s childhood), but no one’s heart is really in it.
None of that, however, is the worst thing. Yes, it is shoddy, for sure. Sometimes the answers can be deduced or narrowed down, sometimes it is pot luck. It is boring, soulless and derivative, too, of everything from Race Across the World to I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. It is devoid of style, tension or anything else we might associate positively with his majesty’s longest secretly serving agent – including chivalry. I mean, yes, Bond shades it into sexism on numerous occasions, but to the husband who instantly urges his wife up a crane, into a tarantula cage and inside a crocodile compound instead of doing a damn thing himself, I would say: you can take things too far the other way, you know?
But there is something more awful about the show than all of this.
The worst thing is Brian Cox. He punctuates the dreary action in the manner of, according to the press release, “a villainous and cultured” Blofeld-ish figure. He purports to be watching from a giant bank of screens and supposedly “revels in the increasingly difficult journeys and questions the contestants must overcome”.
In fact, it looks far more like the producers have tied a cravat around a ham and offered it a lot of money to sit in a broom cupboard for a couple of days to record a load of voiceovers (“About 60 questions in a low growl, darling, if that’s OK? Then a handful of ‘corrects’ and ‘incorrects’, a couple of baleful criticisms for when they really are as thick as two short planks, and maybe a couple of avuncular bits for coverage?”). There are a few pieces to camera, too, so that the viewers don’t assume they are being held in contempt. I didn’t think anything could sully my rewatching of Succession, but this feels as if it could easily succeed. If it does, I will sue Cox and his agent for not saying no, just once.
For desperate eyes only. For everyone else, I would remind you that this is eight hours long and you are not going to live twice.
• 007: The Road to a Million is on Prime Video
