Ultimate humiliation in game shows had previously been confined to red faces as a computer specialist doesn't know what NT stands for. (Come to think of it, what does NT stand for? But now, it gets worse.

	The family erupt in fury, cursing the poor old woman as they're unceremoniously shepherded from the studio.	There's a new gameshow in Japan called Happy Family Plan that has to be the most savage television programme yet devised. On the show I saw, a poverty-stricken family was taken from the Tokyo slum in which they live and offered a fantastic house, a healthy income and even a yacht, if they could succeed in just one challenge. The chosen family has to agree before the challenge is set and, of course, they all do. In this particular episode, the family's eightysomething grandmother was required to play Keep It Up with a football, maintaining the ball in the air for 50 bounces without letting it touch the ground. She was given two weeks' training by a top soccer coach, then, live in the studio, she gave it a go. Game girl, she managed 31 bounces in a row. Then the ball fell to the floor. The family erupted in fury, cursing the poor old woman as the whole gang were unceremoniously shepherded from the studio, without so much as a Blankety Blank cheque book and pen between them, to return to their life of abject poverty. It is no surprise that this is a Japanese gameshow. We have all seen footage of the comically sadistic shenanigans of Endurance. What is surprising is that a version of the show is on its way over here, and Cilla Black is presenting it. Of course, Cilla's show is going to be much more Cilla. It's called Moment of Truth, and it is on ITV this autumn. In the UK, a family picks from a range of prizes, perform the challenge and, if they lose, get a booby prize. It's not as tense, of course, because there is less to play for and less to lose. You know that if the kid fails to win a day's training with Michael Owen, Owen will still send him an autographed T-shirt. It's a wasps' nest with all the stings removed.
	Instead of Richard O'Brien camping it up, there is Melinda Messenger giving it loads of eyes, teeth and enthusiasm, while Leslie Grantham glowers as a pantomime baddie.	Not so Channel 5's new gameshow, Fort Boyard, which hits the screen in October, or the return of Endurance UK on the cable channel Challenge TV in the same month. On both those shows, you really see contestants in pain. Endurance UK is a variant of the Japanese show, with contestants eating mealworm quiche, wearing goggles filled with worms, being rolled in batter and fried alive, or being supported over a hot seat wearing incontinence pants filled with vindaloo. It doesn't have quite the sting of the Japanese original, either, as spending all day in a glass box with no food or water, or being dragged in shorts over gravel has been removed. Endurance UK is more about being squeamish than being hard. Where all the torture in this new wave of cruelty television reaches its apotheosis is in Fort Boyard. At first sight, Fort Boyard might seem a bit familiar. It is a French gameshow that has been running for 10 years, and the format rights were sold to the UK once before, when it became The Crystal Maze. The Crystal Maze, however, was to Fort Boyard what Cilla Black's Moment of Truth will be to Happy Family Plan. Channel 5, through Pearson Television, has bought the full, unadulterated rights and is filming the show on the actual fort itself, which stands in the Atlantic just off the Bordeaux coast.
	What you hate is what you will come face to face with. And we will have a right old laugh at your expense.	Instead of Richard O'Brien camping it up, there is Melinda Messenger giving it loads of eyes, teeth and enthusiasm, while Leslie Grantham glowers as a pantomime baddie. But the main difference is in the games that the people play. Where The Crystal Maze challenged contestants to fill beakers of water until a ball rolled down a tube, Fort Boyard makes them pick clues off the belly of a live tarantula, or pull one out of a treasure chest filled with scor-pions, or grab one off a wall as they plummet past on a bungee jump. And it gets a little bit nastier still than that. During the selection process, contestants are quizzed about their pet fears and hates. Most, it transpires, assume this is to avoid panicking them. But no. It is to bring them face to face with their Room 101. In Fort Boyard, what you hate is what you will come face to face with. And we will have a right old laugh at your expense. "The emotion of the contestants is what the show is all about," agrees Messenger. "They seem to forget the cameras and concentrate on the challenge itself, which means that when they fail, you see them weep or shake or get angry. They clearly don't make the connection that this is going to be seen by loads of people. My heart goes out to them sometimes, but it does make great television." I watched one episode being filmed in which a team from the Pinnacle Health Club in Newbury, led by a former commando called John Bebbington, charged around the fort chanting some quasi-military refrain. The three men and two women in the team (all the teams are mixed, and the production crew has been known to dump less attractive teams in favour of better-looking but less physically fit contenders) abseiled up and down walls, crawled through tarantula-laden spiders' webs, were catapulted 300ft into the air, and had to steer a wire-mesh cart through a cage of live tigers in their bid to get clues to open a treasure store. The tarantula incident was pretty touch-and-go for Annaleis, who had to manipulate the living arachnids, but it was poor Emma's bungee jump that made the programme.
	Failure is not an option on Planet Reebok.	Standing on an iron gantry hundreds of feet above a raging sea, Emma screwed her eyes up tight. The terror on her face was clear. Over on the fort, her team-mates were screaming: "It's all right, Emma, you can do it . . . just jump!" After a couple of minutes, Emma, quite sensibly, told them all to shut up and struggled with her fears in silence. The camera, focusing on her face, caught her exchanging words with the man who strapped her into her harness. She was clearly warning him not to push her. Suddenly, Emma threw her arms up in the air and seemed poised to launch herself into space. The crew drew in their breath: this was going to be the moment. "This is great television," someone behind me breathed. And then it was over. She had refused. The technician removed her harness and she began the long walk back onto the fort's battlements. Of course, the essence of gymnasium culture is the just-do-it mentality. Lycra-clad sweat monsters take each new weight as a brand-new challenge. Failure is not an option on Planet Reebok. So, as Emma walked back along the iron bridge, her team-mates seemed stunned. They patted her on the back and murmured a few words, but nobody took the weeping girl into their arms. They just walked back and on to the next challenge. For the rest of the game, Emma stood slightly apart from the rest, occasionally consoled by the production-team members. The nearest she got to a hug was when the team leader, John, picked her up and used her body as a kind of table to stack the coins they had won in order to increase their take. The cruelty of the whole situation was palpable and, quite frankly, it was gripping. None of the tedious bouncing around that Gladiators contestants engage in here. In Fort Boyard, genuine, tear-stained failure is a real option.
	It is probably about time we got some real pain into our television.	It is probably about time we got some real pain into our television. Not since The Word introduced The Hopefuls - where people drank vomit to get on television - have we seen TV treat us with the contempt it really feels. The success of real-life soaps should have shown us the way long ago. As a gameshow nation, the British are notoriously hard to impress, and that is possibly because we have imported the gameshow from America, where winning is good. This is a country, on the other hand, in which the National Lottery Big Ticket has problems attracting any sort of audience, despite cash prizes of tens of thousands of pounds. Sure, it's nice to see someone win a lot of money, but not as nice as watching someone struggle with defeat. After all, that's closer to what we experience every day. As channels proliferate, the shows that torture contestants will spread as fast. It is a trend that should see our television leaders plunder more from Japan, France and other grim-faced nations than from the foolishly enthusiastic children of America. After all, that's what being British is all about. As this trend continues, however, we should always remember the words of Chuck Barris, MC of the brutally rude Gong Show: "The ultimate gameshow," he said, "would be one where the losing contestant was killed." Just how far are we ready to go?