The show that never was

Yes, yes, YES. The wait is over. ITV’s latest interactive game show, Can’t come, won’t come comes hot on the trails of those twin runaway successes of yesteryear, Two Fat Taters and What not to bare.

The action is not in your kitchen or your bathroom though, but along this flight of stairs to my left. It’s like this. Once you’ve been hooked up in the normal way, you get allocated a number of avatars as usual. You can have two to five of these, this time depending on your postcode and the current status of your pension fund.

Your host, pictured right, will be Ms Tippy Top Gear, a perfect cross between Jeremy Clarkson and Trinny. She will start with deconstructing your personality and distributing your various talents, foibles and flaws more or less evenly among your avatars. This time, however, these won’t be pitting their wits against each other but attempting to make it up a 10ft flight of stairs in this secondhand Stannah stairlift I’m sitting in.

The apparatus will be remotely controlled by your host’s right thumb. Built-in sensors here will relay any changes in your body temperature to your host’s brain. The steadier your temperature, the greater your chances of arrival at the top of the stairs. If you fail to maintain an even body temperature, the thumb will be triggered to activate the switch, sending the chair and you plunging to your death at the bottom of the stairs.

If, however, you do manage to negotiate your way to success through the mounting levels of difficulty that characterise each stage, you are in for a very special prize indeed. But first things first. The above mentioned “difficulties” may take several forms, from a pack of Her Majesty’s deranged corgies leaping about the stairs to holding onto and inventing feasible uses for a large black conical object in a deadpan manner.

And now the prize, although I’m sure some of you have guessed it already…yes, it’s an actual, life-sized replica of the last set of male genitalia known to have been involved in causing the birth of a child on planet Earth.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I really must be g-g-g-annneeeeee-aeeeeeeeeggggg.