It is easier, perhaps, to list the things The Box is not, if only to give ourselves something to cling to when the more recognisable trappings start to wobble, the floor gives way and we find ourselves in a tent with Joey Essex, watching in silence as a topless John Bercow hurls glitter at an audience of braying pensioners. Some things The Box is not: a sitcom; a medical drama; a property show presented by sockless men with teeth that follow you around the room; a thing about badgers. Beyond this, however, we are on our own.
The opening titles do little to assist. And, finally, a distinctly disobliging caption that is nevertheless pivotal to the wilfully befuddling modus operandi of this six-part series: “NO HELP”. Or rather, “bløødy hell”, because The Box is a Norwegian format so something may have been lost in translation.
Anyway, shh, because it’s episode one and here is Gary Lineker. Inside them, we learn, are a corresponding number of trembling minor celebrities. Finally, the doors of the containers slide open and they – and indeed we – are off.
As the opening captions state, there is no help and few instructions for the contestants. Instead, they must “work together” to “solve challenges” such as finding hexagons to fit into hexagon-shaped holes and completing an egg and spoon race in a set amount of time. Then they are divided into teams before being sent back to a custom-made house.
Then one of them is eliminated. The only certainty here is that the boxes are pointless, their sole purpose being to briefly conceal contestants from their location, a task that could just as easily be achieved with a blindfold made out of old tights. This would, however, deny us the sight of Essex bursting out of his box like a frightened horse at Epsom, or a boxed-in Danny “I’m a content creator” Aarons shouting about how he “can’t hear the skies” while frantically thrashing his horrifying Norman-era bowl cut from side to side like a one-man Battle of Hastings.
Unlike, say, Taskmaster, where chaotic things happen for a reason, here, chaotic things happen for no reason and continue to happen long past the point at which either their chaotic methods or pointlessness would make some sort of sense on a conceptual level. The second episode, for instance, ends with a genuinely harrowing sing-off that climaxes with Bercow performing a rendition of Pink’s So What, while a tentful of holidaymakers aggressively demand he remove his shirt. The Box isn’t so much a gameshow as a sustained howl of existential confusion.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
