Presumably, there is a finite number of possible celebrity competition formats. Eventually, every celebrity will have done every possible show and we'll have before us an army of well-trained, superfit celebrities who can ice skate while making a tarte au citron. When that happens, the rest of us can relax because we'll have reached the optimum state of a peaceful universe: the zero state, the state in which no more celebrity shows are possible.
Until that point, we have Flockstars (Thursday, ITV, 8.30pm), which hasn't so much come up with a new format as beaten an old one (One Man And His Dog) with a shepherd's crook until it has twitched back into life. The idea is that a group of presenters, dancers, and other famous people use dogs to herd a flock round an arena ie. celebrities chase animals, even though the other way round would have been much better ie. animals chase celebrities - preferably fast, wild animals and slow celebrities. Be patient. The day for that format will come.
The first episode of Flockstars had the celebrities facing a series of new challenges, including "the countryside" ("why is the ground green? Why is it not red and carpety like normal?) and "a fence" (Amanda Lamb stared at it blankly and asked what she was supposed to do. "Do I go over it?"). But they were then introduced to the dogs and the programme perked up considerably.
The first of them was a Scottish border collie called Hoggy who demonstrated what Scots doggy disgust looks like when he spotted to the New Zealander Brendan Cole doing Strictly dance moves in the field. Brendan was told there were four commands: "come by" which means go left, "away" which means go right, "lie down" which means stop, and "walk" which means go (no one asked why the shepherds don't just say "go left", "go right", "stop" and "go").
After some weeks of training in the commands and how to use them, Brendan, Hoggy and the other contestants then moved to an arena where they were asked to herd a flock round the showground. In an attempt to keep the suspense up, the presenter Gabby Logan hinted that it could be a flock of pretty much anything. "What are we herding tonight?" she asked before the first round. It was sheep. She asked the same question before the second round. It was sheep. But still she persisted. "What are we herding tonight?" "What are we herding tonight?" She is determined to make it a catchphrase.
The other one was "release the sheep!", which was better, although by this point the programme was starting to feel like it was flogging a dead one. But then we learned more about how the dogs work, and the kind of relationship they have with their shepherds. And, against the odds, the show started to get interesting.
What was most interesting was finding out about the trick a shepherd has to pull off of harnessing the predatory instinct of a dog (essentially, its in-bred desire to hunt down and kill the sheep) and using it, restraining it and encouraging it when necessary. We saw clips of some of the shepherds, including Hoggy's owner, Emma Gray from the Borders, handling it all with great skill and speed and it was fascinating. In the moments when the dogs were fast, then slow, then poised in a frozen second, it was also rather beautiful.
By showing this extraordinary relationship between man and dog, Flockstars actually managed to subvert the usual problem of the celebrity reality show. Usually, when you tune into a show like this you are very quickly left disappointed in celebrities, disappointed in ourselves for being interested in them, and disappointed in the world generally.
But in Flockstars, the opposite happened – instead of disappointment at the nihilism of celebrity, there was just wonder and joy at seeing what dogs are capable of: instead of realising how stupid celebrities can be, we realised how intelligent dogs are. Perhaps in future episodes, we could go further and ditch the famous people altogether and focus on the dogs instead. Perhaps we could issue the celebrities with just one, simple command: "go".
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