“My special listening device”

So in five minutes time it’ll be the third edition of Space Cadets, and really what has happened over the preceding 120 minutes?

The answer, of course is not much. Indeed on last night’s programme it took the contestants thirty minutes screen time to get off a plane and onto a bus. Whilst the scale of the prank is proving to be as impressive as Channel 4 intimated it doesn’t make it an interesting programme. Indeed quite a lot of airtime last night was given over to the fictitious chat between two of the “guards”. I might be wrong here, but when Beadle dressed up as an Estate Agent to prank someone on Beadle’s About I don’t recall that we had to put up with scenes of him and some fictitious colleague chatted idly about fictious rising house prices.

In many ways Space Cadets reminds me of Channel Five’s ill-fated Jailbreak. Like that programme, it is too in love with its own fictitious world and seems determined to show us what a great job its done and fashioning authentic looking Russian plug sockets, at the expense of showing us anything entertaining.