Carnage! What is it? “A bunch of cool cars on an epic collision course!”
Carnage! Where is it? Real men carry it in their hearts, but it is also on a patch of unidentified lawless desert and Sky One.
Which is to say the new Sky series, Carnage (which should so have an exclamation mark after it that I may write to my MP on the matter), is devoted to watching six teams a week race weaponised cars round a series of obstacle courses (sorry … “three brutal arenas!”) and try to bash each other into trenches, pits, the paths of monster trucks and oblivion. Because! There can be! Only one! Winner!
Everyone has a great time. The presenters (Freddie “it’s absolutely roastin’ out ’ere!” Flintoff, grime MC Lethal Bizzle and Capital FM’s Vick Hope) stand atop towers and shout encouragement at the contestants. Freddie, incidentally, sports a diamante-studded T-shirt that I’m sure I bought in Mango in 1986, but once I got used to the revelation that time is a flat circle, I was able to move on and enjoy the rest of the show. The contestants get to say things such as: “We’re going to destroy everyone!” and: “That Jag’s looking pretty soft from where I’m standing!” And one member of each team gets to drive whatever armoured, bespiked, be-buckraked, be-cowcatchered vehicle they have brought along until the vehicle is immobilised or they are paralysed by whiplash.
One vehicle is painted pink because it belongs to a team from Leeds called A Nut and Two Spanners and their driver (“the Nut”) is – possibly to forestall accusations that this splicing of Top Gear with Robot Wars feels a mite masculine in our new, gender-fluid age, or possibly simply to save us all from being overwhelmed with its sheer raw virility – a lady. Julie is her name. Driving headfirst into things – deliberately, I mean, not like a normal woman driver, amirite?! – is her game. Their blushing Land Rover has a height-adjustable plough on the front and a metal flail on the back. “It all just come out of me ’ead!” beams one of the Spanners.
Hubristic Scottish trio the Unit meet their nemesis in the first “brutal arena” (called the Grid, a truly terrifying name for anyone scared of right angles). Shropshire farming students the Monks (I don’t know, and I wouldn’t let it worry you) shove them into the three-metre-deep trench that surrounds the Grid. I could try to dress it up for you but, yeah, basically, the Monks’ “soft Jag” heaves the Caledonians’ spiked Sierra into a ditch. Simple, effective and very satisfying for all concerned.
Alas, the Monks come a cropper in the penultimate (“This is proper bare-knuckle now!”) round, set in brutal arena II: the Scrapyard, when the Hellraiser team’s souped-up Mitsubishi Gonad, replete with steel panelling, battering ram and pyrotechnic arsenal, bears down on them. The Jag’s driver fails to follow the delicate tracery of instruction poured through his headset into his ear – “Flatstick it out of there, he’s up your arse!” – and is crushed. On second thoughts, it may have been the Scrapyard’s own monster truck, the Shredder, that did the damage. It matters not. A vehicle was flattened. That is all ye know in life and all ye need to know. In the final round, Hellraiser takes out Julie’s pink Land Rover, flail and all, by the simple expedient of crashing into her headfirst and parking her vertically on the wall. Here endeth the carnage.
There was a time when I would have looked at this and seen Fun occurring as if through a glass, darkly. Now, however, I’m all in. As the old order is overturned and things slide in all directions, I turn my desperate, hungry eyes Skywards and my desperate, hungrier soul beseeches the powers that be to send me as many scenes as possible of people driving cars at each other, smashing armoured panels to smithereens and laughing in the face of victory and vanquishment alike. Give me presenters and participants having a field day and treating their daft endeavour with neither cynicism, contempt or seriousness. Give me good hearts and petrol-based gladiatorial combat and ask me if I’m not entertained! ’Cos I am! Give me, above all, an exclamation mark and bring me back next week for more – carnage!