Few television programmes have been as influential as Takeshi’s Castle. Introduced by the Tokyo Broadcasting System in 1986, the show was essentially a series of wildly difficult physical challenges at which people haplessly flung themselves, risking injury, humiliation or at least a mouthful of off-puttingly dirty-looking water. It was written off as a novelty – but look where we are now.
You can find the influence of Takeshi’s Castle everywhere. Shows such as Total Wipeout, Ninja Warrior, Ultimate Beastmaster – and even Jackass – took Takeshi’s blueprint for elaborate stunts and ran with it. Anyone who has ever participated in a Tough Mudder obstacle race is doing so because of Takeshi’s Castle. The videogame Fall Guys has moved tens of millions of copies, purely because it is Takeshi’s Castle in all but name. And then there is Squid Game, a cultural phenomenon best described as “What if Takeshi’s Castle contained more scenes of harrowing death?”. This is the legacy of Takeshi’s Castle.
In the UK, though, we have a slightly different relationship with the show. When we first heard of Takeshi’s Castle, it was on clip shows hosted by Clive James and Chris Tarrant which largely existed to inform British people that foreigners were weird. Don’t look them up – for some reason they haven’t aged particularly well.
The next incarnation was in the form of heavily edited versions that ran on Challenge TV, with a Craig Charles voiceover, and was much more interested in all the accidents than anything approaching a cohesive format. It was mindless hangover television, but the contempt for the original show was palpable. Think of it as Terry Wogan-era Eurovision; fun, but not especially sustainable.
That brings us to 2023, the dawn of a new age. In April, a new series of Takeshi’s Castle aired in Japan, and has been rolling out slowly across the world. This month it comes to the UK in the form of Romesh and Tom Take Takeshi’s Castle, in which comedians Romesh Ranganathan and Tom Davis take up the post abandoned by Craig Charles and offer their own relentlessly ironic voiceover. Business as usual, then.
Except that’s not the case. For the first time, British audiences get to see entire episodes of Takeshi’s Castle as it was designed to be seen by Japanese viewers. Not sneered at by Chris Tarrant, or packaged with a culturally insensitive “oriental riff” influenced theme tune. No, these are new episodes, in full, with graphics, in-studio analysis and actual rules. We even get to know the contestants, which is refreshing after decades of seeing them as, essentially, a procession of screaming crash test dummies.
Happily, this is no big-budget remake, either. Although the sets are a little more brightly coloured, the new episodes still have a vague air of being set in a plague pit. The grass is still damp and threadbare. The water the contestants topple into is still sludgy and brown. It’s still a cavalcade of grime and dirt, and non-existent production values.
That brings us to Davis and Ranganathan. The good news is that they are by far the best commentators Takeshi’s Castle has had in this country. They have a relaxed, easy charm, with Ranganathan doing his best to deflate Davis whenever he gets overexcited. They are knowledgeable, too. They explain who the contestants are and how each game works. It doesn’t sound like a lot, admittedly, but that says something about how poorly we’ve been served until now.
There is still plenty of the old irony. It’s less about what a stupid gameshow this is – sensibly, given its influence – and more about how cheap and crap it looks. Ranganathan comments whenever a boom mike falls into shot, for example, and he and Davis mock how absurdly difficult the challenges are. If you are after more hangover telly, especially when these two take against a certain contestant, it’s a lot of fun.
But you know what might have been even better? Giving us the show just as it is. The success of Netflix’s Old Enough last year should be proof that global audiences are now sophisticated enough to enjoy non-scripted Japanese shows without having their hands held via the medium of jokey commentary. As fun as Romesh and Tom are, perhaps a better idea would have been a straight, subtitled version of Takeshi’s Castle. Clearly, our relationship to the show is still evolving. Maybe in another 30 years we’ll get what we actually want from it.
• Romesh and Tom Take Takeshi’s Castle is available on Prime Video.
