What’s this week’s biggest casting announcement? Kieran Culkin and Elle Fanning set to enliven The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping? Carey Mulligan tipped for Greta Gerwig’s Narnia film? How about Cillian Murphy and Daniel Craig “in talks” to brood through Damien Chazelle’s new prison project?
It’s none of the above, obviously. It’s the news that “actress, model and British icon” Elizabeth Hurley will play The Deceased in Channel 4’s “wickedly immersive new reality series” The Inheritance later this year.
This is either going to be excruciatingly unwatchable or the most amazing thing on the channel since the Countdown board was arranged to spell “GOBSHITE” for eight points.
But who is The Deceased and what’s her motivation? She’s a “fabulously glamorous benefactor”, according to Channel 4, and she has the kind of sense of humour that you don’t encounter every day – even if it does seem to have become a little less rare of late.
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For laughs, she has designed a mischievous game that will make things complicated for the 13 strangers who fancy a piece of the fortune she has left behind. These strangers have been summoned to a stately home to work as a team to complete The Deceased’s “devilishly difficult” final requests, overseen by The Executor, aka barrister-turned-broadcaster Rob Rinder.
Alas, only one player can claim the money won each time, so they must persuade the others that they alone deserve the cash they earned together, with the victor being the person most adept at out-scheming their competition. Insert your own corporate workplace metaphor here.
Just as a sidebar, I googled “liz hurley the deceased” on Wednesday, and the top result was Google AI assuring me that she is “alive and well”. Thanks, Google AI.
I like to keep an eye on Hurley because I feel a certain kinship with her ever since I went to a 1990s-themed party – one of those recessionary cosplay things – wearing a black maxi dress customised to look like her Versace safety-pin gown in a very dim light. So I’m confident that screen-wise what she excels at is rocking up to various shows being effortlessly camp.
Channel 4 does indeed assure us that The Inheritance will be camp, with Liz promising that The Deceased “dresses to the nines in every scene”. It will also be “cut-throat and completely gripping”, which either points a fatal fondness for alliteration or is another way of saying “this is definitely as good as The Traitors, we swear”.
The Inheritance, co-produced by The Traitors UK makers Studio Lambert, doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It continues a pattern of actors – and not perennially out-of-work Joey Tribbiani-type actors either – signing on to headline a new-ish breed of TV confections that sit at the intersection of gameshow and reality series.
Actors have long presented gameshows, of course, but the names now muscling in on the patch are becoming starrier, more acclaimed and more likely to prompt speculation about the big pay cheques that must have been waved in their face.
It began in the US, where its version of The Traitors is presented by Scottish actor Alan Cumming, the host with the most major acting awards. Does his Emmy for the persona he adopts while presenting the reality competition series rank among them? He would probably say so. “I act my socks off in The Traitors, just like I did on The Good Wife,” he said last year.
You can see why there was a long queue of people keen to front The Traitors Ireland – an honour that went to Sister Michael herself, actor Siobhán McSweeney.
There’s no better example of the trend than Jamie Foxx, who won the best actor Oscar in 2005 and now hosts Fox gameshow Beat Shazam. The industry being the international affair that it is, this is filmed in Dublin, meaning Jamie Foxx got to visit Johnnie Fox’s pub.
But the phenomenon also thrives outside the US, with ITV recently gifting us Genius Game with video-link inserts from David Tennant. This show was baffling in so many respects that the question “why is David Tennant fronting an ITV gameshow?” was the least of it, frankly. Maybe he wanted to emulate fellow Rivals star Danny Dyer, erstwhile host of The Wall.
I did enjoy the bit on Genius Game where one of the contestants explained that it was “not just about being the best, but knowing when to be the best and when not to be the best” – a strategy I plan to implement at work.
Speaking of The Irish Times, I must inform my more televisual-minded colleagues that the dream is over. The dream of having a CV that includes both “journalist for The Irish Times” and “well-paid gameshow host”, like the late Henry Kelly of Going for Gold, is toast. It’s an A-lister business now. Everyone else is playing catch-up.
