Not even Freddie Flintoff can hit the target with a Bullseye game-show reboot

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There’s a real magic to old TV game shows that you don’t really get in modern productions. The glassy-eyed contestants, the barely-worth-it prizes, the slightly problematic hosts. Actually, maybe “magic” isn’t the right word. Crapness? Yeah, crapness.

But it’s a comforting crapness, and something that defined an era of British television that’s been lost to time. That’s not to stop us trying to reach back into that era, though, and drag that comfort kicking and screaming into the modern day with a soulless reboot that totally misses that point of the original.

The latest British institution to get the Demolition Man treatment is 1980s classic Bullseye, which is soon to be updated for modern audiences in the form of a Christmas special, with Freddie Flintoff replacing the late, great Jim Bowen as the show’s host. It will be the first big presenting gig for Flintoff since 2022, when he was seriously injured in a car crash while filming Top Gear.

If you haven’t seen the original Bullseye, first of all, congratulations on not being 100 years old. Enjoy those hips while they last.

Secondly, all you need to know is that it was a quiz show where contestants played a series of darts-themed games (including, surprisingly enough, actual darts) to win wildly inconvenient prizes, on a set that was meant to invoke a certain kind of working-class English pub.

The set was a very particular shade of cigarette-stained wallpaper yellow, the contestants were jittery and beige, and the whole affair had the vibe of a really depressing day down at your local. If that sounds terrible to you, then clearly you aren’t in the target demographic, but back in the Eighties and Nineties that was the closest thing the English had to a national culture.

My dad used to take me to that kind of pub all the time when I was little. This was when you could still smoke indoors, and they didn’t have things like iPads and colouring books on hand to keep kids distracted, so they weren’t exactly child-friendly. Still, I have fond memories of sitting there, listening to my relatives get progressively more drunk and talk about things I didn’t really understand, while I tried to get the pub’s one arcade machine (a glitchy Space Invaders cabinet) to work. It never did.

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That’s the vibe Bullseye was meant to invoke, and when you strip all of that away, what are you left with? A show about darts – maybe the least interesting game ever devised to entertain bored pubgoers. You’d have better luck airing a show about fruit machines, or nervously tearing up a beer coaster.

The issue is that those sorts of pubs don’t really exist anymore. The Americanisation of the UK has extended to our depressing drinking holes, and transformed them into a parade of bars and gastropubs. Setting a game show in a proper English s***house in 2024 is like setting a show in a medieval dungeon. It’s a novelty, for sure, but it’s not exactly relatable.

If anything, they should subvert expectations and just embrace this new age. Have the new Bullseye be set in a microbrewery. Make contestants sit on novelty stools, at a bar that only sells IPAs and mocktails. Give Bully a man bun and some hemp cargo pants (you probably can’t call him “Bully” anymore though – I’m told that’s a microaggression).

Otherwise they risk one of two things happening: either, much like our beloved watering holes, the show ends up with a glossy ITV sheen that runs totally contrary to the vibe of the original and turns it into “just another rubbish British game show”. Or, it tries to capture some of that Eighties magic by leaning into the classic aesthetic, and becomes a parody of itself.

For now it’s just a one-off, so I could see them trying to do the latter, but if it ends up getting picked up for a full run, it’s likely to just blend in with the rest of our underwhelming television output. It’s a shame, too – we used to be really good at game shows in this country, before Bradley Walsh and Stephen Mulhern came along and ruined everything.

Maybe I’ll be proved wrong, though. Flintoff is charismatic enough, and if they go into this with the intention of making this reboot stand out from the crowd they could really score a… hole in one. Or something to that effect.