Lambert explains: “If we want a North London Jewish family, we hang out at Waitrose in Golders Green. For Gogglebox, researchers went out looking for the contributors, rather than holding open casting calls. Shrewd casting is one of Studio Lambert’s secrets. Few individuals have played such a significant role in shaping the television that we watch. In his previous job at the independent production company RDF, Lambert was responsible for Faking It, Wife Swap and The Secret Millionaire, three shows that defined factual entertainment in the 2000s and spawned countless imitators. They are also behind the much-loved Race Across the World and Gogglebox. Last year, they gave us The Traitors, hosted by Claudia Winkleman, which became a runaway hit for the BBC, won a Bafta and has been nominated for an Emmy. If Squid Game: The Challenge succeeds, it will burnish Studio Lambert’s already glittering track record. But overall, Harcourt stresses, “People enjoy being in Squid Game. About 80 per cent are American, so perhaps they were used to better weather. Some contestants have already run to the press whimpering about the conditions, although their main gripe seemed to be that Britain got quite cold in the winter and they weren’t allowed to keep their coats on. “It’s much more akin to a Stanford Prison Experiment-type thing than what we understand as reality shows.” “It’s incredibly immersive,” Harcourt says. The conditions, recreated on six giant sound stages in Barking, east London, and in an aircraft hangar in Bedford, are rigorous: the masked guards never break character and the contestants must sleep in a windowless dormitory of five-tier bunk beds. When they get knocked out, they cry or get angry.” Of course, it’s completely different, but when you dial up that desire to win, tonally it actually feels quite similar,” explains Harcourt. Capturing the contestants’ motivation is crucial: “Rather than being life or death, it’s the gigantic anticipation of winning $4.56 million. How to transfer that sense of dread and desperation to a game show? That is the challenge for Lambert, 64, and Tim Harcourt, 46, who together run the British production company Studio Lambert. The lure of the prize money and the fear of being murdered spurred them on. Squid Game, which in 2021 became Netflix’s most watched show of all time, involved characters in dire financial straits being transported to a mysterious island where they took part in children’s playground games, with a twist – in Red Light, Green Light, a version of Grandmother’s Footsteps, anyone caught moving was immediately gunned down. “Although, obviously, people aren’t being killed.” Reassuring to know. “It’s unlike any game show I’ve ever seen before,” says Stephen Lambert, one of the masterminds behind the project, which was filmed in the UK earlier this year and will air on Netflix in the autumn. The scale of it is something else – 456 contestants from around the globe will be competing for a $4.56 million (£3.55 million) prize, the biggest in reality TV history. But that is what we’ll get with Squid Game: The Challenge, on Netflix, which will translate the violent South Korean drama to the real world. How’s this for a strange idea: take a hellish television thriller in which hundreds of people meet their deaths, and turn it into a game show.
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