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Celebs on the Farm
When will Celebs on the Farm become a hit? When pigs fly. Photograph: Channel 5
When will Celebs on the Farm become a hit? When pigs fly. Photograph: Channel 5

Lock up your pigs! The return of The Farm, TV's most notorious reality show

This article is more than 5 years old

New series Celebs on the Farm looks uncannily like Channel 5’s controversy-courting mid-00s programme. Its contestants may be in for a tough 10 days

Some shows don’t deserve reboots. Some shows create such an almighty crater of notoriety that nobody in their right mind would want to touch them again. Minipops will never be revived, for example. Naked Jungle will never be revived. The Farm? Well, that’s a slightly different story.

The Farm was a Channel 5 reality show in which a number of celebrities learned how to operate a working farm. But you don’t remember The Farm for the premise. No, you remember it for being the show where David Beckham’s alleged lover Rebecca Loos was tasked with masturbating a pig to orgasm.

The incident eclipsed everything else that happened on The Farm. Nobody remembers Vanilla Ice arguing with Paul Daniels until the magician quit in a strop. Nobody remembers Peta getting upset over footage of a duck eating a croissant. No, The Farm was the Rebecca Loos pig show and nothing else. So impossible was it to crawl out from under the shadow of porcine arousal, in fact, that The Farm was axed a year later. “We’re not going to do The Farm again, no,” said the channel’s director of programmes, Dan Chambers, at the time.

But guess what? This summer, a clutch of no-mark faces will appear on 5Star’s Celebs on the Farm. For 10 days, eight celebrities – including Louie Spence, a Gogglebox, Lorraine Chase and two Towies – will slip on their wellies and muck out various types of animal dung.

Putting the culture into agriculture ... the contestants of The Farm. Photograph: Channel 5

Channel 5 has been keen – extremely keen – to downplay any similarities between The Farm and Celebs on the Farm. Because The Farm was a show about celebrities working on a farm, whereas Celebs on the Farm is a show about celebrities working on a farm, so it is completely different.

Maybe a minuscule format tweak will work wonders. What is Love Island, after all, except a honed and toned remake of Celebrity Love Island that has been retuned for millennials? Perhaps Celebs on the Farm will achieve the same feat. Perhaps it will break free of its inauspicious origins and become the must-watch TV show of the summer.

Perhaps, but no. I could give you a hundred reasons why Celebs on the Farm will vanish without trace but I will just tell you the biggest two. In 2004, the “celebrities doing stuff together” genre felt new and exciting, but now it makes up about 80% of terrestrial television. The Real Marigold Hotel – in which Jan Leeming and Wayne Sleep visited India with their friends – kickstarted a tidal wave of competitors. Earlier this year there was Pilgrimage: The Road to Santiago, in which Neil Morrissey and Debbie McGee walked across Spain. In Gone to Pot, John Fashanu and Christopher Biggins travelled the US smoking drugs. And Thursday sees the launch of Our Shirley Valentine Summer, in which Melinda Messenger and Nancy Dell’Olio visit Greece to eye up the locals.

With this in mind, Celebs on the Farm – which, really and truly, is basically a programme about people you have never heard of doing tedious chores – needs to do something major if it is going to stand out against the competition. Given that people only remember The Farm for one moment, that can only mean one thing.

That’s right: I am suggesting that, for Celebs on the Farm to succeed, it needs to be nothing but wall-to-wall animal stimulation. This is what the people want. We live in 2018. People have a near-infinite choice of programming, so the only way for Celebs on the Farm to win is by racing to the bottom. It should swing for the fences. It should be torn from our screens for breaching obscenity laws after a single episode.

Either that or they could just not make it in the first place. That might be the better option, actually.

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