If you had once told me that, come 2023, the beloved cockney archetype and sentient toby jug Danny Dyer would be keeping eight British celebrities in the dark in a bunkerlike hangar in the middle of nowhere, I would simply have said, “Danny Dyer can do what he likes. The man is a prince.”
But if you had then told me that it would just be on a Channel 4 reality show called Scared of the Dark, I would have said, with disappointment, “aw”. In Scared of the Dark the celebrities are deprived of light and toyed with by Dyer and his sidekick, the clinical psychiatrist Dr Tharaka Gunarathne. Danny Dyer having a sidekick who is a clinical psychiatrist is another thing I wouldn’t have predicted a few years ago. Dyer calls him Dr T, which makes me picture him on a team with Dr Hannibal, Dr Murdock, Dr Face and Dr the Van.
Sigmund Freud’s model of psychoanalysis involves a patient on a couch discussing their life while a professional sits beside them asking insightful questions and taking notes. Yawn. Boring!
Dr T’s school of psychiatry involves placing clients in a pitch-black bunker for days on end and spying on them with night-vision cameras as they bumble about, shrieking, and as Danny Dyer says things like, “He smashed his nut!” I’ve been to therapy, and it would have been improved immensely if Danny Dyer had been watching from the corner, saying things like, “He smashed his nut!”
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Celebrities are a plentiful byproduct of Britain’s prolific cultural industries, so television producers now add them to everything they create. (Think of them as corn syrup.) Here they arrive in individual Range Rovers, and the first thing each must do is negotiate a pitch-black room around which their own belongings have been placed – toothbrushes, deodorant, socks. If they can’t find them, Danny Dyer explains, they can’t bring them into “the bunker”.
“Socks? Aren’t they a basic human right?” says Chloe Burrows from Love Island, who is, lest we forget, about to be locked into a bunker for eight days in the dark for our entertainment. (Off camera, a bored production assistant googles “human rights”.)
In years to come, long after the internet has disappeared, Chloe Burrows will tell her great-grandchildren about life in the early 21st century. She will recount her Gulliverian visit to a communitarian island dedicated to romantic hunk love followed by a period with a Hobbesian bunker society devoid of light. And thus will the people of the future understand how we live today.
After the sock thing, the celebrities are all ushered into the lightless bunker. Danny Dyer is the last thing each of them sees before they are engulfed by darkness. He’s basically the angel of death. From then on we watch them with the night-vision cameras, so everything is in shades of grey, as you’ll no doubt recall from the last time you spied on someone with night-vision cameras.
They each respond to their plight differently. The Sandman actor Donna Preston shrieks so much I assume she’s trying echolocation. The comedian Chris McCausland is blind and accustomed to navigating things without sight, so he finds himself helping the others a lot. (This is the most interesting thing about the show.)
Chris Eubank wears glasses, and I imagine he also brought some books and possibly a telescope. He frequently sounds like a malfunctioning AI moments before it decides to dispense with the human race. “You have some who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds only to waken in the day to find that it was vanity,” says Chris Eubank.
“What the f**k?” mouths Chloe, and so mouth we all. (It’s worth mentioning here that they all sleep together in one room. So, in a sense, this is what Alan Partridge predicted when pitching “Youth Hosteling with Chris Eubank” in 1997.)
The first task involves Donna Preston navigating a selection of padlocked doors in the darkness while pursued by a seven-foot high, chain-clanking figure called the Shadow. If she succeeds without being caught, she will win nice food.
‘Chris Eubank argues with Gazza over his story about a dead man on a plane’ is a very specific sentence
Again, this isn’t exactly how Freud would have approached the therapeutic process, but luckily Dr T is on hand. “That’s a sign of anxiety,” he explains, helpfully, as Donna seems to hyperventilate.
Later, Gazza tells us the story of how, after meeting Margaret Thatcher, he “whacked one out”. This is vulgar and sexist but not hugely different from how many right-wing columnists respond to free-market ideology. If he had a posh accent, he’d get a column in the Spectator.
At a certain point, Scarlett Moffatt, a reality-television star who cannot escape reality television, is introduced to the bunker wearing night-vision goggles. Danny Dyer instructs her via an earpiece to toy with the other celebrities – “Tap him on the shoulder!” or, “Take that hat!” – while he and Dr T chortle (therapeutically). Scarlett Moffatt is, by the end of the second episode, literally shackled to Donna Preston and sleeping in a tiny cage.
The official description of the third episode is “Chris Eubank argues with Gazza over his story about a dead man on a plane”, which is a very specific sentence. It’s so named because Gazza tells an improbable story about sitting for a whole transatlantic flight beside a corpse, to which Chris Eubank hisses, “I would like you to stop talking so tragically about your life.” I thought it was an improvement on the Thatcher story.
They’re then told they all have to partner up for a task. Chris Eubank is to be partnered with the pop singer Max George, whom he calls “Alex” only to be corrected. “Max, Alex, doesn’t matter,” says Chris Eubank, darkly.
“It does to me,” says Max/Alex, sadly.
For this task they must ascertain what objects are inside some perspex boxes. “The classic, putting your hands in places you don’t know what’s in ’em,” Danny Dyer says with glee, making me think that he’s forever jamming his hands into things while saying, “Lawks, guv’nor!” and, “Up the apples and pears!”
“I weirdly don’t mind putting my hands in holes,” says Scarlett Moffatt, cheerfully.
What fascinating lives these people lead!
The objects in the boxes include gherkins, a long sausage (“Is it poo?” asks Chris McCausland, which is a reasonable question), a human hand (emerging from a hole, not severed) and a living bunny (I anticipated a tragic Of Mice and Men scenario, but if this occurred they’ve wisely reshot it with a rabbit double).
There’s a later task in which various celebrities walk screamingly along what they think is a beam across a huge drop (actually just a foot or so) in order to win time in a “light chamber”. Yes, they’re rationing light.
“It’s brilliant!” says Danny Dyer of this scheme.
“It’s good,” agrees Dr T.
But that’s enough of the modern therapeutic method. I’m more interested in Chris Eubank, who has stopped speaking and goes to lie on his bed before perching on a sort of shelf in the darkness. “Chris!” the other celebrities cry. “Chris Eubank!”
“Remember, they can’t see Chris Eubank,” explains Dr T.
“Chris Eubank!” they cry again, with more desperation. I too would be worried if a champion boxer was somewhere in my house and I didn’t know where. And I’d never considered bunker-dwelling celebrity mole-people looming from the darkness before. They’ll all be out of the bunker eventually, so that’s something new for us to worry about.
