Somewhere, in a parallel universe slightly worse than this one, ITV’s commissioning team had a very bad afternoon. A producer said “what if we gave a primetime chat show slot to a video game character?” and nobody in the room said no. I’ve spent a genuinely unreasonable amount of time thinking about how this would unfold, and I’m here to tell you: Ofcom’s complaints inbox would melt within the first ad break. We’re talking full server failure. Engineers weeping into their keyboards. The kind of broadcast carnage that makes the 2004 Eurovision scoreboard drama look like a pleasant evening.
These are the funny video game characters UK TV could absolutely never contain, and a rough estimate of how many Ofcom complaints each would generate before the closing credits.
Duke Nukem: the host who makes Jonathan Ross look restrained
Picture the set. A plush sofa, two mugs of tea, soft lighting. Duke Nukem walks out in a leather jacket, sunglasses on indoors, biceps that wouldn’t fit through the studio door without a risk assessment. The audience applauds. Duke grabs the microphone and says something that cannot be repeated on a family blog at any hour. The floor manager faints. The guest, presumably someone from a BBC period drama who was not briefed properly, quietly puts their mug down and considers their career choices.
Duke’s entire personality is built around a very specific brand of 1990s excess that was already pushing limits in a video game where the rating system existed to warn you. On live television, pre-watershed, on a Tuesday? We’d be looking at a minimum of 40,000 Ofcom complaints within 48 hours. For context, Ofcom’s published complaint reports show that genuinely shocking broadcast moments generate five-figure complaint volumes pretty reliably. Duke would sail past that before his first guest arrived. His chat show would single-handedly justify Ofcom’s entire annual operating budget.
Kratos: technically great television, catastrophic for the watershed
Here’s where it gets interesting. Kratos, former God of War, current dad of the year in Scandinavian mythology, would actually be a compelling interview. The man has a genuine story. Tragedy, loss, rage, redemption, complicated fatherhood. You could build a serious 90-minute documentary around him. Graham Norton would be jealous.
The problem is Kratos doesn’t do small talk. He doesn’t do pleasant segues. When a guest overstays their welcome on his sofa, he solves problems physically. When a commercial sponsor’s branding appears on a giant screen behind him, he looks at it with the same expression he reserves for minor deities before everything goes very wrong. The autocue would last approximately four minutes before he decided it was mocking him. I’d watch every second of it, but ITV’s legal team would need a lie-down.
The complaints wouldn’t even be about language or violence specifically. People would write to Ofcom simply because they found Kratos’s silences threatening. “He just looked at Dermot O’Leary and I felt personally intimidated” is not a sentence Ofcom has a formal category for, but they’d need to create one.
Handsome Jack: the one who’d actually thrive, which is the most disturbing outcome
Handsome Jack from Borderlands 2 is, genuinely, the video game villain I think about most when someone mentions charisma. He’s funny. He’s quick. He dresses well. He’d walk onto that set, make three brilliant jokes, charm the audience completely, and then say something that reveals he considers the entire studio audience to be beneath him in a way that’s simultaneously hilarious and deeply sinister. The crowd would laugh, unsure if they should.
This is the one that would cause the most interesting Ofcom complaints. Not outrage. Confusion. “He seemed lovely but I left feeling vaguely threatened and I’m not sure he’s a good role model” is genuinely harder for a regulator to action than straightforward bad language. Jack would interview three celebrities, deliver what on paper reads as perfectly acceptable television, and somehow leave everyone feeling complicit in something. The Broadcasting Code doesn’t have a clause for “made the audience feel morally queasy through sheer charm”, but Handsome Jack would force them to write one.
This reminds me a bit of how certain sci-fi technologies would be immediately shut down by UK regulators, sometimes the problem isn’t that something is obviously dangerous, it’s that the existing rules weren’t written with this specific flavour of chaos in mind.
GLaDOS: the chat show host Ofcom technically cannot complain about
GLaDOS from Portal is where I’d put my money for the wildest outcome. She’d be the most composed host on this list. Impeccable diction. No swearing. No violence. Polished, calm, structured. The Broadcasting Code would find absolutely nothing to action.
She would simply spend 60 minutes conducting interviews with the quiet certainty that every guest is a disappointment to science and that the audience is only permitted to exist because removing them would require paperwork. Every compliment she gives a guest would be technically a compliment. Every observation would be accurate. The episode would be entirely Ofcom-compliant and yet somehow the most psychologically unsettling hour of television ever broadcast. Celebrities would leave the sofa looking like they’d just survived a performance review. The audience would applaud because they were too scared not to.
Bowser: surprisingly good, actually, if ITV could afford the set repairs
Look, Bowser runs a kingdom. He’s organised diplomatic (if hostile) relations with the Mushroom Kingdom for decades. He’s a single parent. He has opinions. Give Bowser a proper show and I think you’d get something genuinely watchable, somewhere between a political interview programme and a nature documentary about a very large and surprisingly emotional dinosaur-turtle. The structural damage to the studio would be significant, but the content itself would be fine.
Ofcom’s problem would be purely logistical. Their standards around set safety, fire regulations, and duty of care to studio audiences were not written with a 7-foot fire-breathing antagonist in mind. Much like how the planning permission system would genuinely collapse under video game world logic, Bowser’s presence would expose a gap in broadcast health and safety legislation that nobody knew existed until now.
The Ofcom complaints department, after all this
I’d like to spare a thought for the actual humans who work in Ofcom’s broadcast complaints team. They already process tens of thousands of complaints a year from shows that are, by comparison, extremely normal television. They handle genuine viewer distress with care and professionalism. If any of the above were broadcast, the complaints would be so varied, so tonally all over the place, and so difficult to categorise that the department would need a separate intake system specifically for “this wasn’t technically illegal but something was definitely wrong”.
On the bright side, it would make for fantastic reading. Much like those comic book story arcs that nobody can fully untangle, the Ofcom report on a GLaDOS chat show special would be genuinely more entertaining than most things actually on television. Put that in your primetime schedule, ITV. I’d watch it.