Chameleon Magazine

British television has discovered another major problem: celebrities apparently aren’t getting enough airtime.

They’ve already got breakfast shows, reality shows, cooking shows, dancing shows, travel shows, quiz shows, jungle shows and endless programmes where celebrities interview other celebrities. Clearly, that still wasn’t enough.

So now we have The Box.

The idea is simple enough: put a group of celebrities into yellow boxes, transport them to mystery locations and give them challenges when the doors open. Gary Lineker hosts, because television executives clearly looked at the schedules and decided what Britain really needed was another programme fronted by somebody already on television.

The wider joke is that British television has become a kind of celebrity recycling plant. The same familiar faces are moved from one format to another, with only the scenery changing. We’ve sent them into jungles, castles, kitchens, dance studios and foreign countries. Now, apparently, the next logical step is packaging.

And that is probably the most revealing thing about the whole idea. There are millions of ordinary people with extraordinary jobs, skills, stories and experiences who could make genuinely interesting television, but finding them takes effort.

Much easier to ring Joey Essex.

At least The Box has accidentally found the perfect name for modern television.

Because for all the talk of fresh formats and new ideas, British TV still seems remarkably incapable of thinking outside one.