Unbreakable, review: BBC couples show is invasive, sadistic and downright bizarre

You need to be of a certain vintage to remember being glued to Mr & Mrs when there was nowt else on in the afternoon. The marital game show put couples on the spot, testing their knowledge of each other’s tics and foibles – her knicker-folding habit, his toenail-clipping regime and such like. The show had a long life, eventually and inevitably enfolding celebrities.

It feels like the harmless ancestor of Unbreakable (BBC One), which tests the love of couples in a more sadistic way: not how well do they know each other, but how much can they rely on each other? One participant in each couple is a celebrity, in the way that people you’ve perhaps never heard of often are (I was familiar with Denise Welch and Simon Weston). It no longer being the 1970s, two out of six are same-sex couples.

They faced two trials in this opening episode. First they were required to cross a stretch of water using two planks without falling in. This brought out the efficient best in three-time BMX world champion Shanaze Reade, and the fuming worst in bad loser Charlie Mullins, a hedgehog-haired geezer who (consults notes) is a jolly successful plumber.

Next up everyone had to learn the lyrics of a random love song and – wait for it – croon them to each other at the top of a bungee plunge. Mr and Mrs this suddenly was not. “All you’ve got to do is fall,” said Reade to her girlfriend, Teddy, who suffers from vertigo. Sports mantras weren’t going to work. It felt grimly invasive to gawp at her genuine terror for our entertainment. At 140ft up she was probably wishing she hadn’t fallen for a celeb.

The show is cheerfully hosted by Rob Beckett, who’s all teeth, specs and quips, but even he struggles to jolly things along for a slow hour fattened out with pep talks, post mortems and quite a dire getting-to-know-you banquet. With two relationship experts as pitch-side commentators, we’re firmly in the feelings-first therapy zone of couples counselling, but with a side order of It’s a Knockout. It’s extraordinarily odd.