Paintball attacks and liquefied rats: why we love sadistic gameshows
From contestants forced to eat cockroaches in I’m a Celebrity or deprived of sleep in Netflix’s new gameshow Awake, we just love to watch human suffering
Awake is a new Netflix gameshow in which contestants must stay awake for 24 hours, then perform fairly routine tasks: counting coins, threading needles, balancing balls, trying not to spring mousetraps. It is like the X Games edition of Saturday Night Takeaway. It comes on the back of another new Netflix show, Flinch, in which Seann Walsh and friends fire paintballs at contestants’ heads, or jab rancid meat in their faces.