Stars Under Hypnosis: the French TV show coming to Britain
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Version 0 of 1. If you want to know what Saturday night television will be like a couple of years from now, a good place to start is Mipcom, the annual Cannes marketplace for television formats. Mipcom is the reason you can’t go anywhere in the world without seeing a foreign-language version of Come Dine With Me, or a sad-eyed man in a horrible shirt yelling whatever the Latvian is for “No likey, no lighty” at a number of terrified local girls in cheaply made party dresses. Mipcom is why everyone suddenly decided that the Israeli singing competition Rising Star was going to kill The X Factor last year. And Mipcom will be responsible for your imminent renewed interest in godawful novelty hypnosis. It has been announced that FremantleMedia has just bought the global rights to a French series called Stars Under Hypnosis, where several famous people unwittingly entertain millions of strangers against their will. The show – which attracted 5.1 million viewers on its debut in France – hypnotises eight celebrities, then drops them into an unusual situation. So someone will attempt to read a bulletin while being attacked by millions of invisible insects, or – in a stunt that is less likely to translate to Saturday teatime on ITV – suffer a mild panic attack because he’s woken up in the middle of a North African market strapped to a goat and dressed in traditional Moroccan garb. It is far too early to know which hypnotist will present the predicted UK version of Stars Under Hypnosis, but they’ve got a hard act to follow. Their French counterpart is Messmer, a Canadian who, in time-honoured hypnotist tradition, doesn’t really blink, has a horrible little beard and relies on Photoshop to make it seem as if he can make things levitate in posters for his own act. It is also too early to know whether or not Stars Under Hypnosis will work in the UK. Televised hypnosis has a more refined edge to it in the UK. Yes, Paul McKenna began his career 20 years ago by making people crawl around horrible pastel-coloured sets for laughs, but it wasn’t long before Derren Brown reimagined popular hypnosis as a tool for creating nightmarish zombie dreamscapes. And – give or take a berserk Phillip Schofield daytime show about Linda Lusardi’s past lives – that is where it has stayed. The French Stars Under Hypnosis is a million miles away from the ornate trickery of Brown. It is an unashamedly shiny-floored show, like Hole in the Wall or Don’t Scare the Hare, and it seems much more interested in broad spectacle than cerebral subtleties. It might be the case that tastes have swung back again, and people are ready to experience what, to all intents and purposes, looks like the Mrs Brown’s Boys of hypnosis. But, if it turns out that the UK has no interest in Stars Under Hypnosis, you can guarantee that Mipcom will have another trick up its sleeve. That Swedish show about toilet rolls, for example. That’s much more like it. |