Have you ever wanted to plant one on Matt Hancock? Here’s the next best thing

No deepfakery, no AI, no CGI. The real Matt Hancock, his real face and a real fist. I just can’t stop watching the former health secretary being punched on TV, writes Tom Peck

Former Liverpool forward Jermaine Pennant did the deed, somewhere in the jungle in North Vietnam, in a sparring match on Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins (Channel 4)

It’s taken a very long time, but the wait is over. From this day forward, and theoretically until the end of time, any man, woman or appropriately aged child will be able to go on to YouTube, type in “Matt Hancock getting punched in the face” and there it will be.

No deepfakery, no AI, no CGI. The real Matt Hancock, his real face and a real fist. It’s hard to tell how many people have already watched it, not least as my own viewing figures may account for at least 2,000 in just the first 18 hours of its existence.

No longer wishful thinking. No longer just the stuff of dreams for the man who ruled over us during Covid, and did a truly terrible job of it. Before today, to see Matt Hancock getting punched in the face you had to just close your eyes and hope to see it somehow projected in soft watercolour on to the backs of your eyelids.

Until now, it existed only as a kind of false childhood memory, supplanted in to the brain through the sheer power of having imagined seeing it so many times that it has somehow become real. But it never was real. Not until now.

And what of the puncher? Well it is former Liverpool forward Jermaine Pennant who does the deed, somewhere in the jungle in North Vietnam, in a sparring match on Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins. If one of the challenges involves punching Matt Hancock, you have to wonder whether producers will have to consider changing the show’s name. Who, after all, would find they did not dare to punch Matt Hancock? It is less a question of courage, more of opportunity.

Matt Hancock’s journey to reality TV a******edom is so well known it hardly needs repeating. (Warned people they’d go to jail if they had an affair –> was himself having an affair –> lifetime of shame.)

Jermaine Pennant was declared bankrupt last year, having conspired to squander more than £10m in career earnings, a subject on which he has spoken movingly in the past. One imagines it is hard to recover from poor life choices of that kind of magnitude, but as a simple statement of fact: someone wins more than £10m on various lottery prizes almost every week. But only one person has ever been chosen, quite possibly by Almighty God, to stand before a full broadcast rig of 4K television cameras, and punch Matt Hancock in the face, and if it cost him ten million quid to do it, then can anyone truly say it wasn’t worth it?

Later, we see the former health secretary hooded and in combat fatigues with what looks to be a very angry German Shepherd going bananas just inches from his hidden face. Next he’s being mock “interrogated” by two very large men who, while it is not real, did previously do this stuff for real, and it frankly doesn’t look all that enjoyable.

Matt Hancock, at this point, and for reasons only he can understand, chooses to look the men in the eyes and say, “Well I handled the pandemic didn’t I,” lets out a short series of tough guy nods, as if seeking to impersonate a welterweight boxer at a Don King press conference.

(It is this particular incident, by the way, that prompted the show’s host former SAS Commander Billy Billingham, to comment that “most of the time he wasn’t a c***.”)

From the available footage, the straight cross from Pennant does not appear to have done any lasting damage, which is arguably just as well. Of course, we wouldn’t wish lasting injury on anyone.

But are we at least permitted to observe that the next desperately narcissistic politician to flap moth-like toward the reality TV flame began filming in Scotland this week?

The Traitors (USA edition) is to feature former commons speaker and world-leading sound-of-own-voice enthusiast John Bercow. That show hasn’t featured a contestant-on-contestant boxing match challenge before, but it must be noted that one of the other celebrities is world heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder. Is it wrong to hope?