The BBC has bought the rights to a lowbrow Japanese game show, which uses a moving wall to ditch contestants in a pool of water in the corporation's latest effort to bring fresh ideas to its audiences.

The BBC will screen the pratfalls and celebrity humiliations of certain segments of Tunnels no minnasan no okage deshita in September. The show has prevailed spectacularly in a television environment where custard pies, eating contests and buckets of maggots remain essential props.

The Tunnels show, which features an ever-changing cavalcade of ridiculous games and gut-churning pranks, is the prime-time jewel in the crown of Tokyo’s largest television station.

Now in its eleventh year, watched by millions and decried by a noted Japanese television critic as “deeply compelling rubbish”, the Tunnels show lurches from feature to feature in an hour of variety.

That variety includes a segment where a large mechanical wall with a shape cut out of it advances menacingly on a celebrity. Unless the victim is able to contort into precisely the right pose to pass through the wall, he or she is shoved into a pool of water.

It is this hole-in-the-wall game feature that appealed so strongly to the BBC, say Fuji Television executives, who have finally managed to sell the concept to the British after successfully pitching the idea to the Russians and Koreans last year. The BBC is understood to have produced 11 episodes of a new show that echoes its Japanese counterpart and incorporates the wall game.

The BBC, like other foreign media buyers that have dabbled in Japanese television concepts, has not bought the rights to everything on the Tunnels show. Japanese television remains a preserve of sexism, ageism, exploitation and bullying that continue to astonish most foreigners exposed to it. “Major foreign TV broadcasters rarely use programmes produced in Japan in their entirety,” admitted a Fuji TV official.

The BBC’s deal comes at a time when even long-term enthusiasts of Japanese television are agreed that standards are daily plumbing new depths. “Just when you think Japanese television is not going to go any sicker or lower,” says WM Penn, a television critic for the Yomiuri newspaper, “it goes one sicker and lower.”

After years of insularity and pure domestic focus, however, Fuji Television is growing to realise the international commercial value that its vast menu of low-brow entertainment commands. In 2004 it sold a cooking contest idea to the US, which became marketed as the Iron Chef.

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