The Void, ITV, review: thank goodness we can go out on Saturday evenings again

Only one more weekend to go, folks. One more weekend until restrictions are lifted and you can spend your Saturday nights queuing five-deep at the bar or snogging strangers in nightclubs or taking a late-night cruise along the supermarket frozen food aisles with mask-free abandon.

Perhaps ITV is expecting everybody to desert television for the summer, which is why it is now putting out The Void. This is a new game show which claims to be “heartstopping”, a description that can only be true if your heart rate slowly winds down to zero due to lack of stimulation.

It is an obstacle course challenge show, and the void in question is “500 tons of unforgiving water”. Or, in normal parlance: a swimming pool. Ashley Banjo hosts the show alongside Fleur East, and they both get stars for effort, but they’re striving to inject excitement when there is none to be had.

The red neon set design is reminiscent of The Cube, the ITV game show hosted by Phillip Schofield. Sure enough, a check of the credits finds that both are created by the same person, Adam Adler. The challenges look a bit like the ones in Ninja Warrior or Total Wipeout - that is, the competitors have to make it from one side to the other by hanging on to various bits of PVC-covered foam.

For shows like this to be entertaining, they must be comical (Total Wipeout) or feature contestants performing impressive physical feats (Ninja Warrior). The Void does neither. The shortcomings became clear when a succession of competitors failed to make it over the first wobbly bridge hurdle, regardless of whether they were a parkour enthusiast or an ex-US paratrooper. The poor design meant that the only way to get across was to shuffle on hands and knees, which looked rubbish.

One of the later rounds pitted two people against each other, thus carrying a vague whiff of Gladiators. All of these physical effort game shows are trying to recreate the Gladiators magic, but they never succeed.

And the budget constraints here were obvious. Total Wipeout was cheap and cheerful - the same Argentinian assault course re-used by contestants from 36 countries - but that was part of its charm. The Void tries and fails to look expensive. It is filmed in an arena but there is no sense of scale. The grand finale involves only one challenge, which is crossing some plastic netting. I suspect this show will fall into the void marked "no second series".