007: Road to a Million, review: James Bond: The Game Show proves surprisingly fun
In exhuming Survivor after 20 years, the BBC splurged a little more than perhaps was wise. Yet set on a single beach, the tropical game show costs buttons compared to 007: Road to a Million (Amazon Prime Video). This is a high-concept, continent-bestriding adventure contest that only a streaming giant with bottomless pockets plus the backing of Barbara Broccoli could ponder funding.
The idea is that pairs of Brits are given outward-bound tasks that a certain fictional spy might undertake. Beginning in Skye, they have to traipse for miles in search of a reinforced case containing a computer that poses a locally themed multiple-choice question. Get it wrong, as some do, and it’s goodbye. Get it right and on they go to Venice or South America, where more finicky and gruelling tasks await.
Their motivation is not the defence of the realm but the titular lucre which tots up with each correct answer. Of course money means nothing to James Bond, who never pays for a single martini, shaken or stirred, but what ordinary mortal would clamber across a high crane or approach a tarantula simply for the buzz of a quiz? It gives nothing away to say that in a 007-themed contest, one attribute of Bond’s is indispensable: no one goes all the way if they can’t shoot straight.
It’s great fun, which is a relief. The questions are just tricksy enough to stop the rest of us screaming every answer at the telly. It’s ravishingly and also daringly filmed. When two contestants take the steep route up the Sugar Loaf, yes, they’re discreetly harnessed, but it looks testing and precarious.
This isn’t for anyone suffering from vertigo – contestants or viewers. The health and safety protocols must have caused conniptions at the insurers. Also, the paperwork will have piled high to rope in so many tourist boards, civic authorities, trains, planes and automobiles.
Along the way contestants have to grapple with slithery, snappy creatures. Among other vertebrates unharmed in filming are wild geese and shaggy dogs, both heavily featured in a clue hunt sometimes so drawn out that you can forget which hemisphere you’re in.
For all the bangs and whistles, what makes this fly is the people. An 11-strong casting team has done its homework to find resourceful and likeable players with often potently incentivising back stories. Meet Beth and Jen, two emergency nurses whose unfussy British modesty masks intense drive. A married couple – Josh of Bangladeshi origin, Kamara is Caribbean – are inspiring company, their eyes ever-widening as they overcome obstacles and watch their horizons expand.
But the most natural screen talents are Joey and James, brothers from Croydon. Central-casting south Londoners who specialise in colourful unscripted banter, win or lose these two diamond geezers merit their own series.
This could be the costliest such show ever mounted. For now. The pot for Squid Game: The Challenge, due on Netflix, is $4.56 million (the winners here get a measly ￡1 million). An undisclosed sum has been trousered by Brian Cox who, hamming it up splendidly as an M/Blofeld composite named “the Controller”, issues instructions from a lair and purrs all the way to the bank without lifting a finger.
007: Road to a Million is on Amazon Prime Video from Friday 10 November