Rise & Fall, Channel 4, review: The Traitors’ garish little cousin is cruelty television

The big hit for BBC One last year was The Traitors, a juicy parlour game in which a group of strangers were put in a Scottish castle with Claudia Winkleman’s fringe. Three of them were secretly anointed as “traitors” and had to knock out their rivals one by one, while trying to go undetected. The last competitor standing got a six-figure prize. It was a compelling watch and featured contestants who seemed refreshingly normal rather than reality-show wannabes.

Now here’s the Channel 4 version: Rise and Fall, made by the same production company. It is The Traitors’ garish little cousin, featuring a cast of characters engineered to cause maximum controversy and supply endless “OMG” social-media content. Radio 1 DJ Greg James is the host, an odd choice because he’s the least sinister presenter in existence.

Six of the 16 contestants occupy a penthouse on top of an “iconic” London building (it’s the former London Transport HQ above St James’s Park station, a handsome building but hardly iconic) and the others are stuck in the basement subsisting on broth and cold showers. The “rulers” in power have to make these below-stairs “grafters” complete a series of tasks in order to raise the prize fund from zero to £100,000.

The first task involved the grafters getting electric shocks. Straight away we’re into Stanford Prison Experiment territory, with some of the rulers willing to see the others suffer. There is a streak of unpleasantness running through Rise and Fall which was entirely absent from The Traitors. Contestants in the The Traitors had to do mean things but it was always just a game; here, you suspect that some of them just aren’t very nice people. There was no back-stabbing – all the bitching was out in the open.

Cartoon villain of episode one was Ramona, a hospitality CEO who for some reason had forgotten to put a top on under her jacket. Most of the others barely got a look-in but the Channel 4 press information reveals why they were picked: a young man speaking finest estuary English is actually “from one of Britain’s oldest aristocratic families”; someone called Sophie who appears entirely lacking in gumption is a loudmouth on social media who hit the headlines by claiming she was “bullied out of the Conservative Party”. The show feels like it’s going to be hit, but for all the wrong reasons.

Source: telegraph.co.uk