The Contestant - Storyville (BBC4)
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Back in the days when we laughed openly at foreigners and their peculiar ways, the strangest sight on television was a Japanese game show called Endurance.
Contestants, all of them male, volunteered to undergo inventively sadistic tortures, with Clive James On TV airing the goriest excerpts every week to the astonishment and delight of ITV audiences.
Some of the punishments, filmed all over the world, were merely brutal: cannonballs were lobbed at their testicles, and platefuls of frozen spaghetti were served to players immersed in ice baths.
