Getting away from it all...
OUR WILDEST DREAMS CHANNEL4, 8PM
IT’S usually around this time of the year when many of us start to think about summer holidays.
This winter seemed so utterly interminable, one which felt like it started in September and still hasn’t stopped, that some of us might be forgiven for thinking about skipping the joint for good.
You know the feeling – you wake to face another grey, miserable day when it feels like the clouds are sitting on your shoulders and you just want to jack it all in and go live somewhere nice. Ideally, somewhere you’ve been before on previous holidays.
Plenty of Irish people have done just that and whether it’s coming back from trying to open a pub in Spain or just buggering off to Australia or Canada, faraway fields are always attractive.
But just how far is too far?
Would you, even in your most exasperated moments, ever think ‘sod this for a lark, I’m off to live in a Ecuadorian rain forest?’
It’s certainly a big leap, but that’s exactly what one English businesswoman has done.
A new four-part series Our Wildest Dreams (Channel4, 8pm) kicks off tonight and follows four families who have decided to really get away from the rat race by moving as far from the beaten track as you can get.
This episode introduces us to Mari – no second name has been provided – who met and fell in love with a shaman in the Amazon. As you do.
They moved back to London but when that didn’t work out, she decided that she and her daughter should go back to the new hubby’s rainforest idyll and start a fresh life.
Swapping one of the great metropolitan centres of the world for an isolated Amazonian community of
40 people is an undeniably ballsy move and worthy of respect.
But how did the transition go?
Well, at one point Mari notes that “everything is more prehistoric here”.
Funny enough, I say that whenever the wi-fi isn’t working at full speed...
The Nineties (Sky Arts, tonight, 9pm) has been a frequently riveting walk down memory lane of the last great decade we had.
Let’s put it this way, for the 10 years or so between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union and the events of September 11
2001, optimism about the future was the default position for most people, whereas nowadays, optimism about the future is a sign of potential madness.
This episode deals with the Gulf War.
Even the wars seemed a bit safer then – after all, there were no Russians overtly in the mix during these Middle Eastern jousts.