Small screen: Challenging the celebrities

CELEBRITY TREASURE ISLAND

Celebrity Treasure Island is back — but can it possibly live up to the 2001 original? I have my doubts.

I doubt, for example, that any of 2019‘s cohort will utter a line as good as the late, great celebrity builder Cocksy, when he turned to his teammates in the first episode and asked: “Do you guys want to watch me kill a chicken?”

I don’t know about you but if I had to trust any New Zealand celebrity from history to efficiently and humanely kill a chicken, Cocksy would be near the top of the list. But his teammates said, “No, let’s take the box that doesn’t have the chicken in it.”

By the time the other team deciphered their text message clue and got to the chicken, the bird was already on its way out. Hindsight suggests you probably shouldn’t lock a live chicken in a wooden box without any food, water or ventilation.

In the end, it was Danny Morrison who put the chicken out of its misery, then turned to the camera and said, in a manner reminiscent of Jack Nicholson in The Shining: “You’ll be grateful later girls, yummy yummy.” Again, hindsight suggests Morrison probably shouldn’t have been allowed on television — but these were simpler times.

When it comes to celebrity reality shows, simpler is almost always better. The new Celebrity Treasure Island will no doubt be heavily structured around things like “challenges” and “gameplay” to try to make it “more exciting”. But the magic of the original series was in how boring it was.

Nobody actually wants to watch celebrities do egg and spoon races like they’re on some grown-up version of What Now. What we want to see is celebrities bored out of their minds, trying to start fires or catch fish with the tangled fishing lines they found on the beach. (“Some Fijians left them there,” deduced Sally Ridge.) Give us celebrities so hungry they’re willing to eat sinewy bits of chicken that a former cricketer has roasted on a stick over a fire.

Some modern combination of efficiency and impatience has robbed us of these moments in recent years. As a result, it’s unlikely 2019 will provide a mental disintegration as swift as that of Anthony Ray Parker after he got his team lost in the bush. “To tell you the truth I’m not having as much fun as I thought I would have,” he confessed to the Confession Cam, then spent the rest of the first episode muttering the idiom, “Too many chiefs, not enough Indians.”

I hope I’m wrong and that they let the 2019 celebrities get as bored as their 2001 forebears. I hope one of the teams cheats and lights their fire with a contraband lighter. I hope somebody gets caught with a muesli bar in their bag and immediately throws their daughter under the bus for it, the way Morrison did in the perfect first episode of the original Celebrity Treasure Island.

Celebrity Treasure Island begins 7pm Sunday on TVNZ 2. The first episode of the original series can be viewed at NZ On Screen.