2 hours ago
8
Is there no format that can’t be made to work by hiring Mel Giedroyc to host it? With or without Sue Perkins alongside her, the presence of Giedroyc makes any kind of chat/quiz/contest caper watchable. You can hand her virtually nothing and she’ll turn it into something welcoming and cheekily funny. To demonstrate this beyond dispute, E4 has come up with No Strings Attached, a profoundly silly piece of flim-flam that is objectively awful, and with any other presenter would be unbearable.
The result of a commissioning process that can only be explained by severe staff/budget cuts, a complex blackmail situation or a rogue shipment of hallucinogenic cocaine, No Strings Attached proceeds as follows. A celebrity sits in an armchair opposite La Droyc. Each of them clutches a sheaf of paper, upon which is printed a piece of erotic fiction – written specially for the show by amateur writers who have previously churned out weird fanfic on the internet – where the celeb is the protagonist. As the famous-ish person reads aloud the story of their imaginary sexual escapades, Mel follows the text and reacts, encourages and guides. Lest this become visually stale, we cut regularly to puppets that are performing the actions described, in explicit furry detail.
First up is Sam Thompson of Made in Chelsea, Celebrity Big Brother, Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins, Celebrity Coach Trip, Celebs Go Dating, Celebrity Ghost Hunt, The Celebrity Circle, CelebAbility, I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! and I’m a Celebrity... Unpacked fame. His story fantasises that his friendship with fellow reality star Pete Wicks has turned physical, the carnal overtones of their appearance at a shirtless charity fencing match eventually brimming over into a different kind of swordsmanship – this causes a Romeo and Juliet-esque controversy in the celeb community, since one of these randy new paramours is from Made in Chelsea and the other from The Only Way is Essex, but Sam and Pete’s lust cannot be contained.
In the studio, Sam and Mel have work to do, since the story is fairly comic and quite outrageous, without being very funny or properly filthy. But they soon strike up a rapport, starting with Giedroyc’s reaction to Thompson referencing 55 as the age of an old person, and continuing when he starts to dry up and Giedroyc suggests they have another gin and tonic, wielding a litre bottle of Schweppes herself. (No Strings Attached is one of those shows where you can imagine one of the crew being given the specific, crucial job of supplying just the right amount of booze to the host and guest.)
On they go, with Giedroyc’s interjections bolstering the script’s more suggestive moments (“Have you got a very big tongue, Sam? You’d need quite a big tongue for that”), her flawless comic timing forever funnier than what Thompson is reading out: the way she reaches for a previously untouched bowl of peanuts just as he says “Their slick members brushed against each other” is the work of a master. The story, meanwhile, is a sort of half-parody, generally playing it straight and letting the ludicrous subject matter do the entertaining, but then sometimes reaching for a fully comic metaphor: “Sam feasted on Pete’s manhood like a hungry dog at a barbecue … suckling the water from his nipples like a thirsty piglet” being the climax of a scene set in a locker-room shower.
Each episode runs to 40 minutes including the ad break, which is approximately 38 minutes longer than it takes for the novelty of the concept to wane, particularly since the puppets don’t add much beyond the gag of their nipples and genitals having been replaced with tufts of feathers. We are entirely reliant on Giedroyc’s indefatigable professionalism as she takes on the persona of a permissive, mischievous auntie, happily indulging the weak sauce of the material and finding fun just from being in the guest’s company. The other episode provided by E4 for review sees her bond effortlessly with Kerry Katona, joshing about her terrible Australian accent and the possibility of her earning a casting call from Coronation Street as Katona unwraps a tale set backstage at a TV talent contest, during which she romps with both Peter Andre and Mel B.
None of the guests is likely to be top-lining No Strings Attached on their CV any time soon, and Giedroyc is much better in a good show than she is in a bad one, but nothing she’s in can be all bad. It’s unlikely you’ll remember No Strings Attached at all, not least because you might not make it through a whole episode, but if you do, she’ll be the reason.
