From the U.K. where the elf and safety racket has knocked the stuffing out of us. or why the Japanese Takeshi's Castle is so entrancing to English children
My children watch it with complete rapture, because it is so alien to our culture. There are real teeth being knocked out here, surely; there are ligaments being torn, ankles sprained, ribs bruised, and still the sons and daughters of Nippon queue up for more.
I do not think my children are being more than normally sadistic; it is just that Takeshi's Castle responds to a deep and unmet need in modern British life.
It is the need to see real risk, real danger, real humiliation, and of course real failure: all the things that are so expensively and so ingeniously airbrushed out of our mollycoddled and over-regulated lives.