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Con­tenders, ready! Glad­i­a­tors, ready! Cross-Your-Heart male bra, ready!

It’s back. This week­end that naff 90s Sat­ur­day Night fam­ily enter­tain­ment sta­ple Glad­i­a­tors returns to British TV — though this time on sat­telite and cable only.

A few, pos­si­bly super­flu­ous, observations:

It looks a lot kinkier. It looks, in fact, like a sub­ur­ban fetish party. Rather ‘dark’, with a lot of leather and rub­ber and a lot of porno pout­ing — and that’s just the guys.

The most pop­u­lar male Glad­i­a­tor, ‘Spar­tan’, wears a skirt.

Some of the men also seem to be wear­ing bras. It’s dif­fi­cult not to won­der they’re a bit lack­ing in the tit depart­ment but have good abs, so they gave them some­thing to cover up their saggy breasts or over-large nipples.

Or maybe, along with the skirt, it is just more evi­dence that the male body is now as pack­aged and fetishised, not to men­tion scru­ti­nized, as the female vari­ety — at least on Prime Time TV.

Actu­ally, on the basis of the new Glad­i­a­tors, you could argue that women are now held up to less exact­ing stan­dards. The men are show­ing more flesh than the ladies — and their flesh is much more spec­tac­u­lar. Spartan’s abs aren’t really ter­ri­bly use­ful, but they do look fan­tas­tic, so let’s have him hang­ing by his arms while the cam­era zooms in on them.

Either way, the Glad­i­a­tors, male and female, with the excep­tion of pig­tailed Bat­tleaxe who looks like she might actu­ally be able to han­dle her­self in a pub fight, seem less like super-heroes than a bunch of tarts.

But then, tarting’s what we want these days. Espe­cially on fam­ily shows like Gladiators.

It’s a mea­sure of how main­stream met­ro­sex­u­al­ity is now, how ‘nor­mal’ it’s become, that even naff old Glad­i­a­tors has been met­ro­sexed up — ‘for all the fam­ily’. The orig­i­nal series was of course also a form of lycra-clad voyeurism, but with a It’s a Knockout/PE-teacher hearti­ness as fig-leaf. New Glad­i­a­tors, on the other hand, like the brave/terrifying new met­ro­sex­ual world we’re liv­ing in, isn’t the least bit shy and doesn’t need fig-leafs. Instead, we’re given skimpier out­fits and flick­er­ing, lust­ful, wicked flames lick­ing around their per­fect bodies.

Some­times the effect though can be very con­fus­ing. Atlas (left), with that long blond hair and sly wink he does on the web­site, looks less like Charles Atlas, than a cross between Pop­eye, Jes­sica Rab­bit and Dick Emery. It used to be said that female body­builders looked like men in wigs — but look­ing at Atlas I can’t work out who or what is wear­ing the wig. Tran­sexy time again.

Per­haps inevitably the trailer for the new series includes a pas­tiche of the hit 2000 film Glad­i­a­tor, set in the Col­i­seum. Glad­i­a­tors were slaves, com­modi­ties of worked-out human flesh that were bought and sold and pit­ted against one another in a life and death strug­gle by Roman show­biz at the point of a sword. Now though it’s done at the point of a TV con­tract. Who says civ­i­liza­tion doesn’t advance?

Per­haps I’m read­ing too much in again, but to my eye this adds a layer of irony to the inclu­sion of sev­eral black Glad­i­a­tors — in an attempt to update the for­mat to reflect multi-racial Britain. Or per­haps sim­ply to make it look more ‘exotic’ and saleable.

The muscli­est glad­i­a­tors mean­while seem even musclier. Atlas and Destroyer look more impos­si­bly mas­sive than the big Glad­i­a­tors of the Nineties series, such as Hunter and Wolf. The bar has, lit­er­ally, been raised. Their shoul­ders in par­tic­u­lar are vast — per­haps because since the 90s, partly down to the orig­i­nal Glad­i­a­tors series, we’ve all got a per­sonal fit­ness trainer — or are related to one. So they have to be EVEN BIGGER.

Or per­haps it’s because we’ve all got widescreen TVs now.

Some­how I don’t think it ter­ri­bly likely the steroid ‘epi­demic’ that drug agen­cies have warned is ram­pag­ing amongst young men today because they want a desir­able body like the ones they see in the media will abate any­time soon.