Silence Is Golden is embarrassingly unfunny ...Middle East

If you’ve ever been in the audience for a TV programme, you’ll be aware of how much effort is required from you. Before the recording even starts, you’re made to whoop, cheer and laugh so they can later splice your apparent reactions into whatever moment they please – it’s exhausting. But the audience of U&Dave’s new series Silence Is Golden have an entirely different experience – they are being paid to be quiet while performers attempt to make them laugh or react. 

On paper, it’s a good concept. The studio audience are given a quarter of a million pounds just for being there and they’ll be able to take their share of it home if they can stay absolutely silent for the entire show.

Host Dermot O’Leary warns us that the production company can’t actually afford to give away all that money (a fact already apparent from the low budget feeling of the thing), so they’ll be attempting to make the audience members make as much noise as possible. If they make a “small noise” they lose £5,000, while a “big noise” will cost them £10,000. 

Immediately, there’s an us-versus-them mentality to Silence Is Golden, but it’s not entirely clear whose side we should be on. In charge of making their spectators laugh are comedians Katherine Ryan, Seann Walsh and Fatiha El-Ghorri (there’s no mention of whether the show can afford their appearance fees), who have a range of variety acts at their disposal, ready to unleash their versions of entertainment on the silent gaggle.

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What follows is a sort of pub open mic night, with acts including a drag queen, a man dressed as Santa Claus reading out filthy Christmas cracker jokes, a man who puts his hand in a bear trap (without getting it caught), a man in fluffy cat ears tickling people with a feather duster and – most outrageously – a naked older lady. But what makes these nights so fun in real life is the jovial atmosphere – something Silence Is Golden is completely devoid of.

I suppose you had to be there. For their part, the audience are having a whale of a time and end up losing a whopping £30,000 in the first performance – and to be fair I would struggle not to laugh (or indeed cry) if a drag queen was belting Mariah Carey’s “Without You” centimeters from my face. But the fun doesn’t translate onto the screen at all – one moment in which Katherine Ryan brings out an audience member’s dog falls embarrassingly flat, while Seann Walsh’s incessant shouting grates after just five minutes.

For the most part, the audience members are kept an enigma, despite each of them having a microphone and a camera trained on their face at all times. It makes it hard to root for them – do I want them to win this money or not? It seems Dermot and co don’t relate to them either, calling them “pathetic” for succumbing to laughter in one moment, and then trying their hardest to get them to do just that the next. Walsh sums it up while watching the man and the bear trap: “No one cares.”  

Silence Is Golden suffers from following Prime Video’s Last One Laughing, a series with a similar concept (don’t laugh) and a much better cast; money isn’t an issue for Jeff Bezos. As a result, U&Dave’s attempt feels like a very cheap imitation of a show that has already been watched – and loved – by 6.1 million viewers.

But perhaps its biggest problem is that it doesn’t live up to its central premise of making you laugh. I’m not sure how the audience left with only £60,000. I managed to keep a straight face for the entire time.

‘Silence Is Golden’ continues next Monday at 9pm on U&Dave

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