Can you have too much hate in your hate-watch? That is the question that presses unexpectedly hard as the new reality competition show The Summit begins. The premise is hateful in the standard way: 14 strangers (which might as well be 17,000 in televisual terms – only The Traitors does more and it generally dispenses with half of them before they have even set foot inside the castle) are gathered together to tackle a task for which they are vastly and vividly unfitted – in this case, they are going to climb a mountain. In the New Zealand Alps, if you care. If you do, you won’t for long.
None of them, naturally, have ever climbed a mountain before. It’s possible that some have never seen a mountain before. It’s possible that some have never walked anywhere before. Thomas has – he’s a tour guide – but he doesn’t like heights. Tyra has done the Duke of Edinburgh bronze and silver and thinks it can’t be much different from that. Pageant and fitness coach Afton, whose ultra-posh accent sounds uncannily like Celeste Dring’s Eugenie in The Windsors, has been glamping “but thaaaah was a chaaaaarf”. (There was a chef, in case you were wondering.) She wears a pink Lycra outfit and starts screaming when she sees mud.
There is a welcome sense of the world righting itself when it is revealed that Afton is “Doctor” Gillian McKeith’s daughter. For those of you who don’t remember, McKeith (who agreed with the Advertising Standards Authority in 2007 to stop using the title, partly because looking at people’s tongues and peering at poos they’d done in lunchboxes for Channel 4 did not make her one, but largely because she did not have a recognised qualification) was a prominent early shill for pseudoscientific practices (including the advice to eat lots of leafy vegetables so that the chlorophyll could oxygenate your blood) and an entirely useless contestant on 2010’s I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! Then there’s Dockers, a self-professed “alpha male”, proving once again that if you have to profess it yourself … . Sean is the group’s self-professed “most valuable player”. Warren is stunt casting – in the 90s, he was famous as Ace in Gladiators but later discovered God and is now an Anglican minister.
There are others, and other back stories, but who has the strength?
‘They seem to hate each other as much as I hate them’ … the rope bridge challenge on The Summit. Photograph: ITV
Ben Shephard is – just barely – the presenter. He turns up for a minute or two at the beginning to explain in fairly desultory fashion that they will each be carrying a share of the £200,000 prize pot in their backpacks (Why? The money is in notes, not weighty coins, so it’s not to add to the physical challenge. Is it in case they cannot deal in abstract concepts?) and that they must cooperate in order to reach the summit because whoever doesn’t will have their share subtracted from the total available. They already seem to hate each other as much as I hate them, so this could be fun.
Publican Miranda volunteers to direct the group. She is good with maps. She’s not so good, it turns out, at being able to stay near the front of the group and lead them in the direction she would like them to go. Eventually, and with an impressively bad grace, she relinquishes the map, clearly in the hope that they will now all fail to make base camp within the allotted time. Go, team!
When they reach a rope slung across an abyss as their first challenge, Dockers volunteers to show them how it’s done. My notes read “omega male” and it’s a pity the Greek alphabet only ran to 24 letters.
The motley crew (just) make base camp, Ben puts in another two-minute appearance to tell them some bad news and then they are left to kip in tents on bare ground for the night. Good, though I would chuck a groundsheet or something to Thomas, who is by now emerging – in an uncrowded field – as a reasonable human being.
The next day, Dockers throws a tantrum at finding one of his gloves over-toasted by the fire, accusing all and sundry of sabotage and taking against Thomas’s lack of support in particular.
I shall not spoil the ending, except to say that I forgot to tell you that there is a stupid, hateful black helicopter known as the Mountain Keeper that flies around “intimidating” the contestants and halfway through the episode’s final challenge drops instructions that made me boot the screen in. See you back here next week, I guess. I hate myself most of all.
The Summit aired on ITV1 and is available on ITVX.