Gladiators and Nostalgia

Ah, another trip down memory lane. Is it possible to feel nostalgic for a programme that last visited our screens a short eight years ago? Sky One certainly thinks so. The changes made to Gladiators from last time around are merely cosmetic. Gone are the irritating double act of John Fashanu and Ulrika Johnson and in comes the twee pairing of Ian Wright and Kirsty Gallacher. Meanwhile the old (classical?) Gladiators have been pensioned off and new blood taken on. As you would expect they're hard bodied, rippling with muscles, athletic and very, very sexy. The events haven't really changed either, but this is nostalgia so would we really want them to?

We were treated to just five events in this debut. The new Gladiators showed their mettle by easily disposing of their opponents in the one on one events. Wielding the pugil sticks Panther to send the hapless female contestants flailing into the waiting pool below, while Spartan ("the flirt in the skirt", apparently) made short work of the men. And on the Pyramid our contenders were, as they say in parts of Derbyshire, given a good shewin'.

They fared slightly better on Hit and Run and Powerball - events that put the contestant against a team of Gladiators. The latter involves running around and dumping a ball in glorified buckets, while avoiding rugby tackles, grapples and the like. And the former sees our plucky contenders sprint across a bridge, trying their best to dodge attempts by the Gladiators to bump them off with a foam padded demolition ball.

With the end of the show in sight, the new Eliminator was revealed. The old Krypton Factor assault course had nothing on this. Swim a length, climb a cargo net, get on the monkey bars/hand bike, run up the pyramid, glide down to the travelator, scramble up it and over the line ... and into the quarter finals! In short, harmless fun for all the family!

The return of Gladiators is symptomatic of the deep nostalgic tendency within contemporary Anglo-American culture. The fluidity and rapidity of change, the heaving complexity of social relations stretched across the surface of the globe, the unchecked dominance of capital; all conspire to generate cultural economies of great uncertainty. The paradox of the erasure and absence of tradition is the creation of a longing for it, and it is a longing capital tries to fill to feed its eternal hunger for more profits, more accumulation. And so capital meets existential crisis with packaged titbits of nostalgia: Rick Astley's Greatest Hits, limited edition Whispers, skinny leg denim, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and Gladiators.

But this is commodified nostalgia. It anchors you temporarily in the illusion of a time when things seemed so much simpler. And so for an hour Gladiators trod the well worn path of the first series, minus the 80s hair hang overs that afflicted many of the original bunch. Oblivion is Wolf. Spartan is Warrior. Atlas is Hunter. Inferno (pictured) is Jet, etc. But this is disposable nostalgia. As new TV shows fill the nostalgia vacuum, the short-lived celebrity of the cast will disappear with the inevitable demise of Gladiators, until a third revival at an unspecified point in the future with a new cadre of built bodies, and so on for as long as capital stands as the arbiter and driver of culture.

You want Gladiators forever? Then you need socialism my friend ...