The Cube Offers Plastic Peril
What do you get when a channel has an empty prime-time slot and acrylic plastic surplus to requirement? ITV's prime-time acryli-fest gameshow: The Cube. That's what.
Back for a second series, The Cube fulfills the part of ITV's remit which states they must use the abundance of Poly (methyl methacrylate) stored in the warehouse since Simon Cowell's Plastic Death Dungeon of Doom was officially decommissioned in late 2006.
Contestants are tasked with completing simple games within the confines of The Cube. With 7 games in total, contestants are given 9 lives. Lives are lost if a contestant fails a task, and they then have to repeat that game. Contestants can opt to take the money after any game, but once they've agreed to play, they must continue until completion or run out of lives. Each game offers a greater sum of cash upon completion, the final game offering £250,000, which for a few minutes of frolicking in a box seems like a nice earner. But as with any game show, it's never that easy. The draw of The Cube is that the games themselves are deceptively simple, inspiring the sort of 'I could do that' mentality that hangs on the very best shows, allowing families to sit at home wincing as they debate tactics, commanding contestants how best to proceed.
But despite a lack of technical proficiency and the stunning simplicity of the games, they're also surprisingly difficult to master. The skill set needed to successfully make £250,000 is higher than that required to govern most countries. Agility, concentration, determination, dexterity, memory, reflexes and nerves of shatter-proof acrylic are a must.
Games are attributed with the sort of enigmatically simple names that encapsulate everything about the show. The names somehow convey exactly what the game is, whilst giving away absolutely no information about it at all. Casting players down a paradoxically perplexing perspex spiral, contestants can expect to encounter some of the following: Construction, Drift, Perimeter, Quickfire and Reversal.
Expulsion, for example is a game in which contestants are faced with another acrylic box, this time containing 500 small plastic balls. Contestants then have 20 seconds to expunge all 500 balls using only their hands. But that's just one example. The games may vary in difficulty, but they all maintain the same glorious lucidity — the sort of rudimentary games a prisoner would devise to amuse himself were he to only have access to a pencil, a penny, a matchbox and some string.
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