What the-? What did we just see? We’re fairly sure that someone slipped a hallucinogenic compound into our tea before we watched the final episode of Switch. It’s the only explanation about how an hour of television could be so insane.

But this is what happens when a show exists in a vacuum of attention. It can be as mad as it wants. No one pays attention to Switch. If we didn’t review it week after week we’d be fairly certain that it didn’t exist either. It’s almost as if the writers and production, had this precognition months in advance and knew no one would see the series finale, so they just turned a series of escalating dares into an hour of television.

Dares such as, can we get Caroline Quentin to spend the episode in a squirrel costume? Can we get Gerry (Jamie Davis) to carry around a wooden cock on a stick and get his arse out? Can we get RADA-trained Imogen Stubbs to agree to appear in this sugar-coated farce? And sadly the answer to all of these questions is ‘Yep’.

It’s the Summer Solstice, so the girls decamp to a sort of Pagan Glastonbury in the ‘village that Midsomer Murders forgot’ in order to sit in a tent and drink. Much like a camping holiday on the Isle of Man, then. Grace’s mum (Caroline Quentin, who must have been blackmailed into being in this) is also there for Witchmas, and she’s dressed in a giant squirrel costume to protest commercialism. What do squirrels have to do with anti-commercialism? We don’t know, but you never see one with an AMEX card, do you?

The rest of the episode is really just a series of micro-events that would have been cut from an early edit of a Carry On film – Gerry and Stella have to pretend they’re a couple, Jude thinks she’s going to have sex but instead becomes a godmother, Grace is set up on a date with a man who talks about his plums (ooh err, missus!), and Alexa and her Witches of Kensington trout pout about the woods. You do really get the feeling that this is the longest day of the year. It certainly feels like the longest hour of TV in a long while.

And then Switch suddenly decides to become Jeremy Kyle with a cauldron, as we discover that human sparkler Hannah is the step-sister of rich witch bitch Alexa. It’s an eleventh hour piece of plotting so out of the blue, so non-sensical that you genuinely wonder if the episode is going to end with one of the girls waking up and realising that the past hour was all a crazy dream generated by a dodgy kebab and one too many episodes of Hollyoaks. It would be a good way to explain the existence of the whole series really.

But it’s not to be. Switch ends in a chummy and literally rose-tinted way, oblivious to what we the audience think of it and seeming without the inclination to return for a second series. Frankly we can’t imagine the cast would wish to come back. You can only stand in a wood and be shouted at by a woman dressed as a squirrel so much before it starts to affect your reputation as an actor.

Aired at 10pm on Monday 19 November 2012 on ITV2.

> Order Series 1 on DVD on Amazon.

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