Fairly desperate: BBC1’s Unbreakable reviewed

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. But naturally, too, the familiar traits of the dodgy lookalike celeb show are firmly in place: among them, the constant reminders of what tremendous fun we’re having, the clever use of Grieg’s ‘Morning’ to signify morning, and the abiding sense that the whole thing has been made to supply clips for Gogglebox. (Cue the bungee jump.)

Except that this is not how Unbreakable sees itself at all. As befits its otherwise baffling BBC1 status, it’s apparently a programme with a serious purpose: to discover and pass on ‘the secrets of a strong relationship’. And to prove it, Rob is joined by two authorities on the subject. One is the improbably telegenic ‘relationship psychologist’ Anjula Mutanda, whose credentials were briskly established in Thursday’s opening episode by shots of her in an armchair holding a clipboard. The other is the more vaguely titled ‘relationship expert’ Maria McElerne, who, after being told that the 69-year-old ‘millionaire plumber’ Charlie Mullins and his 32-year-old girlfriend RaRa had been going out for only eight months, sagely observed that ‘it looks like a new relationship’.

So it was that, while Rob worked on his chortling, the two women explained with commendably straight faces how ‘the games are arranged so that each aspect of a relationship is put under the spotlight’ – although so far all the aspects have been ‘communication’. Then, as the couples shuffled along planks and so on, they watched thoughtfully before making comments that used phrases such as ‘complementary dynamic’ in a plucky attempt to disguise their bleeding obviousness.

Sadly, this strategy didn’t work any better than the programme’s own pretence that it was there in a public-service capacity to benefit us all. On telly as in relationships, it seems, first impressions can sometimes be bang-on.

Pretence was rather thinner on the ground in Tuesday’s Paxman: Putting Up with Parkinson’s. As the title implies, Paxo was not out to accentuate the positive as he reflected on how his life has changed since he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in April last year. ‘You try to tell me that it’s not all doom and gloom,’ he said to his physiotherapist halfway through the programme. ‘But it is.’

We first saw him shuffling along the street with his stick in a way that recalled the moment in one of Anne Tyler’s novels when a wife has the sudden piercing realisation that the strong, powerful husband she’d long known was now ‘an old codger’. Not, of course, that Jeremy Paxman wanted our pity. He wouldn’t, he insisted, make a film that ‘encouraged poor-little-me syndrome’ – and took a particularly stern line on any questions that he suspected of attempting to get him to ‘blub on camera’. Instead, he hung out with several scientists to discover the current state of Parkinson’s research, including one who helpfully sliced up a human brain to show the effects of the disease.

Overcoming his transparent reluctance, Paxman was also game enough to try some of the techniques used to delay the symptoms – although he drew the line at bellowing like Brian Blessed, on the grounds that ‘he’s such a wanker’. He successfully tried a spot of bowls despite the fact that, as he told his fellow-players, ‘I’ve always associated the game with old people’. (‘But Jeremy,’ one of them pointed out, ‘that’s what we sort of are.’) His Parkinson’s dance class with the English National Ballet led to perhaps the least necessary voice-over in recent TV history: ‘Jeremy has never taken a ballet class before.’

Nevertheless, the most relief he’s had has come from the drugs that have ‘helped a lot’ in alleviating the depression his diagnosis caused. Even here, mind you, he didn’t get carried away. ‘Would you describe yourself as even sometimes cheerful?’ asked an off-screen voice. ‘Wryly amused rather than cheerful,’ replied Paxman: a remark that achieved the neat trick of being wryly amusing itself.