Alan Fraser's Screen Test: Sadly, the new Superstars fails on both counts

Moments like these made Superstars one of the most popular television programmes of the 1970s. It was a must watch - and not just for sport nuts - with its intoxicating mixture of genuine athletic endeavour and utter sporting humiliation.

The modern Channel 5 version, shown on Friday evenings and repeated somewhat greedily just 24 hours later, is a bit light on both these ingredients.

Chris Boardman 'jumping', if that's the right word, about 10-and-a-half feet into a sandpit or Jason Gardener belly flopping painfully into a swimming pool, embarrassing as they were to the participants, are not images likely to last the test of time.

Bloodied and bandaged but unbowed: Kevin Keegan gets back on his bike in the halcyon days of Superstars

But a lot has changed and not just the format. Back in 1973 when it all began, Britain was still in the first flush of the colour television revolution and satellite TV was a long way down the road. The BBC and ITV held a duopoly on a very restricted amount of live sport. It was still a treat to see a live football game; 24-hour rolling sports news had not been imagined.

Many of the competitors were genuine superstars, still at or near the peak of their powers, who remained something of a mystery without the current obsession with celebrity. John Conteh prevailed in the same year as he fought for and won the light heavyweight championship of the world, while in 1976 the aforementioned Borg had just become Wimbledon champion. Injury and insurance considerations seemed less of a factor.

Last weekend saw distinctly B or even C-rated sporting celebrities such as Jane Couch, Karen Pickering, Gardener and Mark Foster struggle to retain their dignity in the company of renta-reality regulars like Martin Offiah and Roger Black. Nor does the emphasis on the team rather than the individual work so well. At least the classic theme tune remains and, as has been said before, Sharron Davies is always worth watching.

The opening shot of that old pro Jim Rosenthal and Davies seemed set up to exaggerate the amazonian qualities of Davies. It was almost as if - in a deliberate reversal of the Willie Carson, Clare Balding and the wooden crate threesome - Davies and not Rosenthal was standing on a box.

The closest and highest quality contest saw team captains Mike Catt and Black go deeply into lactic acid deficit on the bike and rowing machines. The former narrowly won both races, though at 36 he held a six-year advantage.

Personally, I deplore attempts at sanitising the worst of participants' humiliations. We could have done with more than just a flash (definitely not the right word) of Pickering running the 100 metres in 19.3sec and more of Pickering against Foster labouring pathetically over their squat thrusts and dips.

Just how inept can you be about putting a piece of carrot in houmus. What do you mean that's the wrong kind of dips?