"I'm sorry love but I can't be anybody else other than me," the owl attempts to console his tearful, insulted wife after eventually finishing the race. "When I shout, it's loud. You know what I'm like." His yellow eyes are fixed in an intense glare. "I am sorry but I can't guarantee I won't raise my voice again."
This is where the show is at its best - not so much in the preposterousness of its challenges as in the aftermath, where its array of woodland creatures have it out with their human spouses, siblings or parents.
In these scenes, it is almost reminiscent of Aardman Animations' classic Creature Comforts shorts, where they took interviews with ordinary British folk talking about their lives and animated them with claymation zoo animals. All absurd humour and unexpected levels of pathos.
After his inauspicious start, the owl wins the next challenge, beating out the three other teams - a duck and her brother, a stag and his civil partner, and a mole and his dad - to be the first to blindly whack a big apple off a tree with a bat. This time it's the mole's turn to lose his temper after finishing in last place.
"I can't be bothered," his voice cracks as he stands dejected in defeat, his shoulders slumped, his eyes shiny black pools of sadness. "You were rubbish," half-mocks his dad, who for his son's failure remains partially submerged in a barrel of rotten fruit. "That was a very poor effort."
Things get a bit Enid Blyton in the next round, where the teams meet a wise talking tree. He asks them to consider a Family Feud-style survey question: what percentage of people pee in the shower?
"I personally haven't," boasts the mole. "I do it quite often," admits his dad. "Oh you're joking," the mole buries his head in his pink, clawed hands. They guess wrong, and the dismayed mole is swung down on a rope, knocking his dad into a puddle of mud.
It's hard to tell who has it worse on this show. In the ensuing rounds the human team members face being fully submerged in a swamp, and then skittled by a quickly spinning turntable while their partners try to pass them buckets of slops.
This round in particular is almost unbearably chaotic. The commentator remains fixed somewhere between Come Dine With Me's perpetually bemused mockery and Justin Marshall on one of his giddy and nonsensical rugby highs.
When it mercifully comes to an end, and everybody has been soaked to the bone with cold slops, the foulmouthed owl and his long-suffering wife have emerged on top of the leaderboard, earning a crack at the £10,000 prize in the final round.
With a camera fitted to his beak and a battered suitcase full of the loot under his wing, the owl has to rescue his wife from a shed at the other end of the forest. Inside the shed she watches the feed from his beak-cam and tries to navigate him in the right direction.
He almost immediately trips over a stump and stumbles headfirst into the next tree. If they enforced the IRB's concussion protocol it could well be game over.
It's a game of cat-and-mouse (or mole, stag, duck-and-owl), progressing in increasingly tense 30 second increments. The owl gets a half-minute on the run, after which the other three creatures, all armed with big nets, get a shot at capturing him and claiming the prize for themselves.
It's unusually imaginative, it's unfailingly stupid, and in some small way, it's also complete genius.
Watching the owl bumble his way closer and closer to the shed, and the prize money, and his poor harried wife, is weirdly thrilling. Go the owl! He's grown to be an oddly sympathetic and lovable character - somehow much more so than a mere human could ever be.
• Wild Things screens on TV2, 6:00pm Saturdays.
- nzherald.co.nz
