You don't know what you've got till it's gone

An end to war? Environmentally friendly alternatives to oil? The second coming? No. What the world has been crying out for, apparently, is the return of Gladiators (Sun, 6pm, Sky One), which vanished from our screens eight years ago. I don't recall much protest at the time, writes Charlie Brooker. No one established an emergency helpline or threw themselves under the controller of ITV's car. Not a single leading newspaper ran a wounded editorial lamenting its demise and pleading with God for a revival. There were no dazed crowds of jonesing Gladiators fans wandering the street in a sorrowful funk, dumbly bumping into shop windows without even noticing, quivering in a puddle of tears in the cold and distant grief dimension. Its passing went largely unnoticed. A gentle nationwide shrug rolled across the country like an underfed Mexican wave. Gladiators had passed away, and we, as a nation, moved on.

But, like the song says, you don't know what you've got till it's gone. A year after Gladiators disappeared, 9/11 shook Planet Earth's axis to its core, creating a new landmark paradigm in watershed epochs. The world was left stunned, reeling. "Where are our Gladiators now?" it wailed with its mouth, "Because we need something to take our minds off this shit." And in the years following, with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, widespread economic meltdown, and the growing awareness of impending environmental disaster, the clamour for the return of the soothing balm of Gladiators grew ever more cacophonous.

Now the dark ages are at an end: Gladiators is back, and it's better than ever. And by "better", I mean "the same": an hour of people in leotards running, tumbling, wrestling, jumping, and hitting each other over the head with padded sticks, inside a cavernous crash mat-and-searchlight repository.

Gladiators has never felt very British. The audience shriek and hoot throughout, and they're all waving outsized foam hands with pointy fingers, which must make it nigh-on impossible to see. Perhaps they're not baying for blood at all, but just shouting at the person in front to get that stupid foam hand out of the way.

Everything in the arena is either red or blue or a 20,000-watt lightbulb - apart from the Gladiators, whose costumes are monochrome and more individually "pimped" than before. Spartan, for instance, has some vaguely Ancient Roman-style strappy bits hanging down round his balls, leaving him looking like a cross between a promotional poster for the film 300 and a collector's edition of Boyz magazine.

Incredibly, he's not the gayest-looking male Gladiator. That honour goes to Atlas, who has a body made of raw, bulging muscle, but the head and face of a woman. In his introductory ident, he appears to shake his flowing locks and wink coquettishly at the viewer. They should've called him Dorothy and had done with it.

Keeping with the homoerotic theme, you may have noticed that all the male Gladiators have names that sound like gay nightclubs. Oblivion, for instance, sounds like a steaming 4am sinbox filled with strobe lights and shaved heads. But it isn't. It's a 6ft 3in bellend in black trunks. The producers have given Oblivion a complex personality: he's angry and he complains a lot. This makes him different to Predator, who brags and looks hard. The level of characterisation pisses all over The Wire.

The lady Gladiators are slightly less absurd, apart from Inferno, who looks like a pornographic Manga sketch of Geri Halliwell circa 1998, and Battleaxe - a champion hammer-thrower, and the least ladylike of the bunch. She may look beefy and stern, but calling her Battleaxe seems a tad harsh. Perhaps next year they'll bring in one called Dog. Or Moose. Or Boiler.

Actually, in this interactive age, they should throw the naming of the Gladiators open to the public. How about one called Bastard? Or Perineum? Any other suggestions? Send them to charlie.brooker@guardian.co.uk and we'll make it a contest.