Celebrity Juice, review: unfunny to a staggering degree

The worst job I ever had was scrubbing out giant catering pans in the kitchens of a chemical works near the M606. I felt greasy for days. The experience came to mind while watching Celebrity Juice (ITV2), a show that I am now trying to scour from my brain.

Incredibly, last night’s episode marked the start of the 24th series.  It has won two National Television Awards and a Bafta. A Bafta! Celebrity Juice is ostensibly a panel show, hosted by Leigh Francis as his alter ego Keith Lemon, a joke worn so thin that it is no longer visible to the naked eye.

One of the show’s running gags is that Lemon fancies the female team captains. They used to be Fearne Cotton and Holly Willoughby (entirely a coincidence that Willoughby’s husband produces) but are now two other perky blondes, Emily Atack and Laura Whitmore. Atack and Whitmore informed us that they are friends, which shored up the feeling that the show is an in-joke by a group of mates who can’t believe their luck that ITV is paying them to do this.

The teams competed at stupid challenges – speaking without showing their teeth, attempting an obstacle course while wearing waders full of porridge. But whereas this kind of thing is delightful on Taskmaster and Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway, here it deadened the soul.

Everyone swears and says what they believe to be risqué things. There’s nothing wrong with that – one of the great comedy characters is Curb Your Enthusiasm’s foul-mouthed Susie Greene – but here it seems desperately try-hard, a Shooting Stars knock-off aiming for a level of “naughtiness” that a Year 8 kid would dismiss as lame.

The most depressing thing is not that this puerile tosh has an audience, or that guest Jimmy Carr has nothing better to do. It’s the involvement of two women in a throwback to the lads’ mag era, embodying the “Cool Girl” fantasy as described in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (“Being the Cool Girl means  I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes and burping…”).

Of course, it could be that I’m just too old for this. But so is Leigh Francis.