It’s the middle of June and London is currently experiencing a record-breaking heatwave. I’m regularly told I’m ‘ginger-skinned’ and subsequently I don’t bode well with heat or sunshine – so much so that ideally I don’t want to be in the proximity of anyone, actively avoiding crowds at all costs.
Which is why watching 18 strangers become handcuffed to each other for a classic Channel 4 social experiment feels particularly deranged.
Can two people with polarising lifestyles and beliefs stay tethered together for 10 days for a chance to win £50,000 dangling like a carrot for them at the end of the ride?
The thought of it alone activates entirely new hells I wasn’t previously aware of — but here we are, in the New Wimbledon Theatre in London on one of the hottest days of one of the hottest years, watching contestants ranging from a gay porn star to a cleaner and an aristocrat turn their lives upside down to see if they can find common ground with a stranger from a completely different walk of life.
Spoiler alert: not all of them can.
In the opening episodes of Handcuffed: Last Pair Standing, we very briefly watch the moment they’re locked in. It’s a few fleeting seconds on screen, but being there in person, it felt far more loaded than that. The edit makes it look like they’re being churned out and locked in at a rapid pace. The reality is slower, more awkward – and far more exposing.
The set-up looks almost exactly like an episode of Blind Date. Host Jonathan Ross grills one player, diving into their political beliefs, their lifestyle choices, the characteristics they despise in others, while another is blindfolded with noise-cancelling headphones behind a makeshift partition. What feels insignificant on screen was much more of a thorough interrogation on the day.
I’m lurking at the back of the new Wimbledon Theatre watching the first time they meet, already cuffed – and it’s clear there are some teams with a much fairer chance than others.
The first couple I watch are traditional homemaker and self-proclaimed ‘prude’ Charley, matched with heterosexual gay porn star Rob – though we’re not told he’s a porn star on the day, and neither is Charley. Instead, Jonathan only shares that Rob is a former bin man, which feels like a deliberate sleight of hand.
Charley and Rob are interviewed on stage for close to half an hour before they actually meet. Charley says she’s often described as ‘old-fashioned – but in a nice way’.
‘I should have been born years ago,’ she says. ‘I love doing laundry, I love everything about home.’ The anxious housewife admits she struggles with the modern world, petrified of the confronting sexual imagery that is so easily accessible and the foul-language that has penetrated our everyday vocabulary.
Rob, meanwhile, strides onto the stage like a gentle giant, covered head to toe in tattoos. At 23 stone and 6ft 8in, his wrists alone ring instant alarm bells for Charley, who is essentially the size of his thigh. When they put their hands through the partition to be cuffed together, the visual contrast is almost comical.
And yet – within minutes – they’re warm. Affectionate, even.
In many senses, though, they share a lot of common values. Both stress the importance of not judging a book by its cover, both feel others have a preconceived expectation of them and both are genuinely open to immersing themselves in another perspective.
Being handcuffed to a lovely person you’ve never met before doesn’t look too bad.
Later, flamboyant millionaire classic car salesman Anthony confidently arrives on stage for his interview with Jonathan. On screen, he risks becoming a caricature. In the theatre, he didn’t feel like one.
It’s a moving chat that doesn’t make it into the episode. Anthony talks about being sent away to boarding school by his parents at nine years old. ‘It was the worst thing they ever did,’ he says. He describes the bullying, being driven there in one of his father’s Rolls-Royces – a detail that only made him more of a target – before queuing for free school dinners once inside.
‘It was a dreadful place,’ he says of the school. ‘I’ve been back there to tell them.’
Anthony reveals he was driven to school in one of his father’s Rolls Royces, which didn’t help with the bullying, and then at school was queuing up for free school dinners.
‘Privilege is not a fair term,’ he insists. It’s a statement that could easily invite eye-rolls. But hearing him speak in person, there’s a visible melancholy that complicates the narrative. His life wasn’t filled with the warmth many of us take for granted, and that context feels important – even if it doesn’t fit neatly into a punchy intro VT.
Presumably, Anthony’s past will unravel as the show rolls on.
Then Tilly crashes onto the stage with total self-assurance and vivacious energy. She is exactly how she comes across on screen – impossible to dim or exaggerate with editing. A bundle of chaos and joy.
On paper, she’s Anthony’s opposite. Her mum worked as a mental health secretary in the NHS and her dad was a scrap merchant who died when she was 16. She works three jobs and runs a homeless charity. If Anthony resists the word privilege, for Tilly it’s barely entered the room.
Of all the contestants I saw, my perception of Anthony on the day of filming was radically different to the Anthony being shown on screen. When he spoke on stage, my heart broke a bit for the man in front of me. His life wasn’t filled with the same love that many of us take for granted; there is still a transparent melancholy when he talks about his upbringing and journey to becoming a self-made millionaire.
I imagine throughout the series, Tilly will explore Anthony’s past more, learn that the man who hasn’t cleaned a toilet since 1975 may have been driven to school in a Rolls Royce, but that’s where the commonalities with Victoria Beckham stopped.
It’s almost a shame the initial meeting of the couples is condensed to a few fleeting seconds. Blink and you’d even miss it, when there was so much I learned about every single brave soul who became shackled to a stranger on stage in the sweltering heat that day, which hasn’t been shown on screen.
Hopefully, you’ll learn as much as I have about them by the end of the six episodes and we’ll discover which teams have managed to spend 10 days and 240 hours together handcuffed.
Handcuffed: Last Pair Standing premieres on Monday March 2 at 9pm on Channel 4.
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