It was only a matter of time before David Mitchell was given his own comedy quiz show, as he's proven to be the perfect panel show guest (QI, 8 Out Of 10 Cats), a great team captain (Would I Lie To You?) and decent guest-host (Have I Got News For You?) already. The Bubble finds Mitchell as master of ceremonies, but it's perhaps more enticing as a concept than it proved to be in execution. Three celebrities are put into the titular "bubble" with no access to a television, the internet or their mobile phones. Wouldn't "Under A Rock" have been a better title? After fours days, the celebs (Reginald D. Hunter, Victoria Coren and Frank Skinner in this opener), are brought to the studio and have to answer questions posed by Mitchell about current events they missed, essentially having to guess which news stories, TV reports and headlines are true and which are false.
Like I said, it sounds like a great idea, but there were a number of problems that prevented The Bubble totally living up to expectations. For one thing, most of the news stories were so obscure or regionally-focused that you didn't really need to have been denied access to TV and tabloids to play the game. This was likely intentional so that audiences could play along at home (to an extent), which I can understand, but it still felt like it limited the fun. And is four days enough time to keep the celebs media blind? Admittedly, The Bubble's format means it must be relatively expensive to book guests, who have to essentially give up the majority of their week to participate, so perhaps a full week living together just isn't practical.
A lot of The Bubble's success rests on a variable utterly beyond its control, too: what happens in the world. I'm sure there'll be occasional episodes where something monumental happens while the contestants are locked away (a major crime, a natural disaster, a famous death, birth or marriage, etc), and those episodes will certainly be more enjoyable to watch. That said, it'll be interesting to see how The Bubble tries to elicit comedy from tragic news events like the Haiti earthquake, or if they'll just avoid what's genuinely been dominating the news. They'll probably just stick to fun "human interest" stories (like the cat with a can of Whiskers stuck on its head in this first episode), for fear of causing offence. The BBC have already had a sense of humour failure in refusing to create fake news stories to air on the show, which The Bubble amussingly managed to comment on.
But, y'know, I was expecting something a bit ballsier. I guess we'll have to see how things develop and how they tackle potentially "darker" episodes when the guests are blissfully unaware the Queen's been assassinated, the population of France were all wiped out in a plague, or Tony Blair was sent to jail for war crimes.
19 FEBRUARY 2010: BBC2, 10PM
