When Gladiators is filming at the Sheffield Arena, it feels as if everyone is in on the joke. The woman in the ticket office looks at me gravely. “Before I give you these,” she says, “I need to ask a question. These are very good tickets. You’re in the camera block, near the red contestant’s friends and family. So there’s something I need to know. If the camera is on you, are you going to duck and hide and get all embarrassed? Or are you going to go absolutely flipping mental?”
I’ve been up until the early hours painting portraits of my favourite Gladiators with the precise hope of making it on to the telly. Of course I’m going to go absolutely flipping mental! I’ve been waiting for this day since 1992.
That was when Gladiators muscled its way into the Saturday night viewing schedule of every kid in Britain, a copy of an American gameshow that pitted superhuman bodybuilders with silly names against fitness enthusiasts with ordinary jobs. You’d have Saracen using a pugil stick to batter Colin, a painter and decorator from Runcorn; or Lightning chasing Suzie, a dinner lady from Woking, up a climbing wall. It was an immediate playground sensation, spawning catchphrases that are etched indelibly on the memory of every 90s kid. Shout, “Contenders, ready!” in a Scottish accent to any of my contemporaries and they will reply, “Gladiators, ready!” quicker than they can remember their own children’s birthdays.
The boys had posters of Jet, the buxom brunette, on their walls. The girls fancied Hunter, a blond with pecs the size of car tyres. Everyone pretended to hate Wolf, the show’s resident villain and theatrical bad loser, who would sometimes be awarded yellow cards for unsportsmanlike behaviour – one of which he once gobbled in protest.
You could watch it with your mum and dad without it being embarrassing. You could recreate it in PE when your teacher wasn’t looking. Wolf aside, it was an hour-long lesson in fair play, where the strongest man or woman always won in the end – in a nail-biting finale known as the Eliminator, which involved a scrambling net, a zipwire and the fearsome 45-degree Travelator.
Yet when the BBC brought back Gladiators in 2024, the commission was greeted with derision, proof that our public broadcaster had run out of ideas. Alex Mahon, then chief executive of Channel 4, singled it out as exactly the sort of thing the BBC shouldn’t be making. But as soon as the titles rolled and everyone over 35 realised they could still remember the lyrics of the theme tune – “Do you have the speed, the strength, the heart to be a winner? It’s not for beginners” – it was a hit.
Almost nine million people watched the first episode. It vastly overperformed among young people, none of whom were born when the original Gladiators came off air in the year 2000. It’s that rarest of things: a show the whole family can watch together. A slice of silliness in scary times. With the third series about to air, BBC executives will be hoping the Gladiators can unite the nation, shouting at their tellies like they did when Nick Mohammed failed to pick Alan Carr as a traitor last autumn.
Thirty-three years after I first booed Wolf in front of a TV dinner, I’m sitting in the third row of the Sheffield Arena waving a foam finger as a contestant crashes to the mat while Another One Bites the Dust booms from the PA. And they say dreams don’t come true.
I’d gone so mad making posters, I even had one that read simply “CLATTENBURG” in honour of Mark Clattenburg, the former badboy of football refereeing who adjudicates in the reboot. I wave it manically in his direction and my friend Danika and I dissolve into schoolgirl giggles when he spots it and makes a heart with his thumbs and forefingers. We both squeal when he first booms the immortal words, “Contender, you will go on my first whistle … ”
Four months later, I’m in a photo studio in Salford being lifted aloft by five Gladiators. Hammer has my feet, Apollo my thighs, Nitro my bottom, Cyclone my shoulders and Dynamite is complaining there is nothing left of me to hold but my head. Nitro, the eldest of the group at 37, takes charge of art direction. “Extend your arm out like Cleopatra,” he instructs. I’m trying to breathe in while enjoying the moment, but Hammer keeps calling me Thunder – he had asked me just beforehand what my Gladiator name would be – and I’m struggling to keep it together.
It’s all part of my mission to discover why Gladiators has recaptured the nation’s hearts and recreated the magic for a whole new generation. And if that means they have to pick me up so that I can test their strength, well, I’m here to serve.
Soon I’m sitting on a sofa with Apollo, all 6ft 6in of him squeezed into his red and blue unitard. With his floppy hair and smooth skin, Apollo looks as if he has aged out of a boyband, though he is in fact a former England rugby player and American football tight end. There’s a touch of Alan Partridge to Apollo, real name Alex Gray. I ask how old he is and he says, “I’ve been 29 for the past five years.” His persona is of a nice guy with an arrogant edge. He recites poetry between challenges (self-penned, he assures me – “The new Shakespeare, they’re saying”) and pretends everyone fancies him.
I ask him to introduce himself for the tape. He replies in verse: “I am the man of the hour, a guy too sweet to be sour, who guys want to be mates with, and girls want to go on dates with.” Guys don’t just want to be mates with you, Apollo! You’re a gay icon, I say. “Guilty,” he replies. “I‘ve got a lot of love from all sorts of different diverse communities, which has been fantastic. The gays, the mums, the teenage girls.”
So, then, Apollo, are you single? As the words come out of my mouth, I realise I sound like a bit of a pervert. I plough on regardless. Is he on the celebrity dating app, Raya? He laughs and dodges the question. “I’m gonna be honest with you, I’ve probably never been more wanted in my life, but I’ve never been more cautious. There’s a responsibility that comes with being a Gladiator and I don’t take it lightly. You know, I love playing up to the myth of Apollo but at the same time I wanna be a decent person and when I’m not on the show, I like to keep out of trouble as much as I can.”
After Gregg Wallace-gate and various Strictly scandals, the BBC cannot afford any whiff of controversy around another prime-time show. That’s why the Gladiators are drug tested each season. Giant, a man mountain with a ridiculous triangular torso, had to apologise last year when a video emerged of him seemingly posting about taking steroids in his pre-Gladiator life as a bodybuilder (“Take this and you’ll get big,” he allegedly promised). He was supposed to be at the shoot but is too busy appearing in panto in Chesterfield (he’s in Jack and the Beanstalk, playing … the giant, of course).
You won’t catch the Gladiators falling out of nightclubs either, or falling prey to kiss’n’tells. Hammer – another 6ft 6-er, a champion indoor rower called Tom Wilson – looks like a bit of a lad, though I know full well he’s engaged because his fiance was sitting behind me at the Arena, where she politely but firmly refused to tell me whether Gladiators put the bins out. I tell him I like to imagine him out on the lash with Giant and Bionic, yet another 6ft 6in monolith who has bleached blond hair like an early career Gary Barlow. He insists that simply does not happen. “No, not at all. We like to just keep fit and stay away from anything like that really, because it affects your sleep, it affects your recovery and I think it’s important just to be super fit and super recovered and super rested,” he says.
Part of Gladiators’ success is its appeal to young and old. Apollo pitches his lines at the adults in the audience, like when he fishes a mobile phone out of his Lycra in season two and seems to take a call after being beaten on the climbing wall. “Your mum says hello,” he shouts up to the victorious contender. He lets me into a secret. He hadn’t had the phone on him all the time. “As you can see,” he says, gesturing to his hot pants and making me blush, “there’s not enough room.”
Each of the 18 Gladiators has a slightly different outfit to showcase their special powers or, in the case of Nitro’s scoop-necked number, their outrageous pecs. Five are made for each character each season and they are not allowed to keep them when they are not on duty. “They don’t trust me ’cause they know I would go down the shops in it,” Apollo says.
Hammer is the only one who has a prop (it’s a hammer). He feigns outrage when I suggest he is only pretending it is heavy. “When you’re swinging that around, you sure know about it,” he insists. I am disappointed the hammer has not made it to the photoshoot but the PR says that would have been her job “and it’s 15kg, that thing”. Hammer is the viking of the group, with long dark locks that I’d heard were bulked out with hair extensions. He’s having none of it. “This is all mine,” he says, gesturing to the man bun he wears when he is not in character. Up close, I do detect a touch of Just For Men in his beard, though.
The modern-day Gladiators make most of their money now as social media influencers, but 22-year-old Dynamite – CrossFit and weightlifting champion Emily Steel – is hoping for at least a side hustle in music. During the shoot she is writing lyrics for a duet with Apollo, who will apparently be contributing his poetry to the verses. Some of the original 90s Gladiators are still profiting from the show. Fabio, the Guardian photographer, tells me that this year alone he has done two shoots with Wolf for a German garage door company. Others have gone in an entirely different direction. Hunter is now a gong bath healer.
It was the show’s producers who came up with the Gladiator characters, then cast them afterwards. Resident baddie Legend, AKA fitness influencer Matt Morsia, did not have to work hard to behave like an arrogant show-off. He vies with Viper – former model Quang Luong – as the reboot’s Wolf. When I watch the show in Sheffield, little children scream with equal terror and delight as Viper – who growls instead of speaks – rampages through the stands to rip up their posters.
Nitro – former champion sprinter Harry Aikines-Aryeetey, who is probably the most famous of the current crop after his appearance on this year’s Strictly – recalls walking through a supermarket and being stopped by a little girl and her dad. “I said, ‘Who’s your favourite Gladiator?’ And the girl stopped and gave me a deep stare and said, ‘Viper.’ I asked why and she said, ‘Because he’s naughty!’ And I think to myself, that girl could probably have a few red flags in her life. But you know, if she likes him, she likes him. A little five-year-old, sweetest little thing, dressed in a pink dress.”
Last year the producers decided they needed a female Gladiator with a dark side. The rest of the girls tend to play nicely and congratulate contenders who beat them, which sets a good example but can get a little dull. Bad losers are far more entertaining. Enter Cyclone, 24-year-old Irish powerlifter Lystus Ebosele, who looks as if she wants to rip contestants’ heads off. I just love watching big strong women, especially at a time when so many women in the public eye are shrinking. It’s so refreshing to hear 5ft 10in Cyclone say she loves “taking up space” and eats as much as she can in the run-up to filming “so I can be massive”.
I am fascinated by the Gladiators’ diets. Hammer starts his day with six eggs and “a bucket of porridge”, and gets through a kilo of rice every day, as well as three or four chicken breasts (his goal is to inhale 750g of protein daily). When they go out for dinner in Sheffield it’s chaos because so many of the Gladiators order two pizzas each. The whole time I interview Nitro he is stuffing Haribo in his mouth.
Dynamite is the first to arrive at the shoot and boulders through the door asking what’s for lunch. (It’s 11am.) “I don’t want to be really skinny and break every time I get tackled on Powerball, you know. I want to be able to absolutely plough through contenders,” she says.
I have always wanted to know whether the Gladiators are actually trying, especially on the Gauntlet, where contenders have to run through a corridor of huge gladiators wielding ramrods and power pads. Or Powerball, where the Gladiators rugby-tackle the contenders to stop them slamming balls into baskets. Some of the contenders are tiny. Size isn’t everything, Hammer says. “I’m always trying. They’re tricky sometimes, though. You gotta watch them. They can turn real quick. We’re massive, so we can’t turn as quickly. But I’m not going easy on no one.”
At the filming in Sheffield I bump into Aneila Afsar, who came second in series two, and ask her whether she felt the Gladiators were always giving it 100%. On some of the games, yes, she says, such as Unleash, when a Gladiator is basically chasing a contender around an assault course. “But I think honestly, when it comes to things like Powerball, some of us would get flattened if they were really going 100%. I mean you’ve got people there like Fury, who played rugby for England, and Cyclone. I mean, I was one of the smaller contenders. I think if I’d been hit at 100% force, I probably wouldn’t have lasted very long. You’d have injured contestants left, right and centre, wouldn’t you?”
Getting injured is an occupational hazard for the Gladiators, too. By the time the forthcoming series wrapped, Legend, Athena, Diamond and Bionic were all either on crutches or wearing slings. If any of those are your favourites, fear not: they’ll all be appearing throughout the series, just not necessarily in Lycra. At the taping we watch, Legend is sitting in the stands disguised as his own biggest fan for a sketch that had children (OK, and me) in hysterics.
Afsar was the first ever hijabi to take part in the show. I love the diversity of Gladiators. Athena, powerlifter Karenjeet Kaur Bains, is Sikh. Fury is deaf. Viper is Chinese. Sabre is Scottish. There is a Gladiator for everyone – apart from, perhaps, the Welsh. Families of every hue fill the stands. There’s a timelessness to the spectacle. Mums shame themselves with lusty poster pitches (“You can spook me any time, Phantom!”), children rush to catch T-shirts shot into the audience with a cannon. If you’re ever thinking of watching Gladiators being filmed, I must warn you that it is an 11-hour day. But what a day. They let you in with a picnic and they only close the bar before the Eliminator.
Bringing intergenerational joy is the best, Apollo says. “The biggest pat on the back we get is when we meet families and they say, ‘You’ve brought us back together … My kids didn’t want to watch anything with us, they’re stuck doing PlayStation or YouTube or whatever – this is the only thing they’ll sit down and watch with us.’ Honestly, it’s amazing. It almost feels like I’m playing for England, it’s like the people’s show.”
For me, Gladiators is the antidote to a cruel and senseless world. After being a reporter for 20 years, I’ve spent too much time in the darkness. Bring me sparkle! Bring me spandex! Bring me a gigantic Gladiator who can scoop me up and cradle me like a baby! I’ll paint you a poster if you make me a heart sign.
