Three’s new escape room gameshow is a sign we may need to cool the jets on both celebrities and puzzles for a while.
As someone who will watch celebrities do almost anything, it was during Celebrity Escape that I wondered if I had finally reached my limit. The celebrities were attempting to unscramble an ancient Greek cipher to spell a word, and had somehow settled on VATCH, not technically a word. I tried to suppress that same feeling of ballistic rage one experiences while watching a parent slowly log into a smart TV as Josh Thomson, trapped in the escape room with them, summed it up best: “I just wanted to grab it and have a go.”
Three’s new gameshow takes seven comedians – New Zealanders Chris Parker, Abby Howells, Josh Thomson and Hayley Sproull and Australians Luke McGregor, Celia Pacquola and Frank Woodley – and throws them into a lilac-coloured void leading to six different escape rooms. Under the watch of gamesmaster Rove McManus who, as Howells notes, has disconcertingly not aged a day since Rove Live, they must work together to decipher various clues and puzzles and get out of each locked room before the 45 minute timer runs out.
The comedian cast do their best within the extremely rigid confines of the show. Parker and Howells in particular serve as excellent narrators who bring their own neuroses to the fore. Howells, who is autistic, worries that “I’ll get out there and I can’t do puzzles and people will be like ‘what are you good for’,” while Parker constantly has to remind himself not to be an “escape hog”. Pacquola has some excellent one-liners, including “I have a toddler… getting out of my house is an escape room” and Thomson fills the role of ‘competitive freak’ with aplomb.
While there are a few relatable moments of group tension, especially when escape room first-timer Sproull is roundly ignored despite cracking several clues immediately, there’s also a lot of tiresome shots of people’s backs from high-angle Paranormal Activity-style mounted cameras. Despite getting a rundown of each escape room at the beginning of the episode, it’s hard to remember what anyone is supposed to be doing, and even harder to care when the celebrities aren’t even playing for charity, but what appears to be a giant polystyrene key.
A familiar sight of people’s backs in Celebrity Escape. Image: Supplied
Speaking of odd props, in episode one we are faced with a Chekhov’s witch situation after Rove assures us the comedians will be “terrified” and Parker becomes convinced the witch-themed escape room will contain a Spookers-style scare. Alas, when they finally unlock the large closet – Parker so terrified he can’t look directly at it – the big reveal is… a Look Sharp plastic skeleton. With the show puzzlingly receiving $422,000 from NZ On Air, I certainly wouldn’t have minded a bit of taxpayer coin going to a wigged drama student instead.
Things get even more bamboozling when it’s revealed that the comedians must eliminate one person from the group after every room. One by one, they secretly select a badge with the comedian’s face on it that they are voting out. Then, one by one again, they pin that badge onto their comedian of choice. With nothing on the line, most decisions are made through random selection, eenie meenie miney mo, or which comedian dared to wear a hat. “Turns out the fedora was one act of pretension too much,” says Woodley, the first to be eliminated.
That’s not to say that a game show always needs high stakes to drive the series forward. Comedians compete to win nothing but a terrible golden bust in Taskmaster, but the show knows the real prize is giving them space to figure the tasks out (or not) and letting hilarity and threatening raps ensue. Two weeks in, the format of Celebrity Escape doesn’t feel like it has enough room for these memorable moments of weirdness and spontaneity, although perhaps this will come as their number continues to be whittled down.
And, as much I adore them, it does feel like we might need a break from celeb-centric shows for a while. Say any word enough times it starts to lose all meaning, and there’s no denying that having Celebrity Treasure Island, Celebrity Tipping Point NZ and Celebrity Escape all air in the space of a few weeks is threatening to do just that (although we must shout out workhorse Parker, the only local star to expertly complete the hat trick). In the meantime, let us all continue to run around shrieking “VATCH” and wondering how the heck we get out of here.
Celebrity Escape airs Tuesdays on Three and here on ThreeNow.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source thespinoff.co.nz ’
