Final Draft review – could you do 3,240 sit-ups then have a lovely old chinwag?

Like Squid Game meets Gladiators, 25 ripped strangers perform hellish tasks to win ¥30m. But where it gets really interesting is when they start bonding over their dead dreams …In a giant TV studio somewhere in Japan, a retired baseball player and a former rugby star are 40 minutes into a competition to see who can do the most sit-ups. Lying with their feet hooked to the top of a steep, bright-pink slide that has long since become a river of sweat, they must respond to a buzzer every five seconds by hauling themselves up using just their abs and hitting a button with their foreheads. They’ve both done that more than 500 times – when someone eventually misses a rep, their feet detach and down they go.If this were Squid Game, the slide would end with a lethal drop. But instead it’s Final Draft, a wholesome and emotional Japanese reality sports contest for ex-sportspeople, so all that’s at risk is the right to remain in the competition. As a long sequence of incredibly gruelling elimination showdowns whittles 25 contestants down to the one who will win ¥30m (about £150,000), Squid Game is an influence, but so are Gladiators and Ninja Warrior, as well as modern Netflix sports fests like Physical: 100 and Ultimate Beastmaster. Mature British viewers might think of 1970s BBC stalwart Superstars, the multi-event contest between athletes from different disciplines that briefly threatened to turn parallel bar dips into the UK’s national sport. Continue reading...

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