It’s full blown Lord Of The Flies as Brits in the Highlands go wild
REALITY TV is no place to look for deep philosophical insights. if you’re watching Celebrity Big Brother on Channel 5 in the hope of gleaning wisdom from failed former contestants on Love island and The Apprentice, you are wasting your time.
Not that you’ll realise it, because watching Celeb BB is the world’s biggest waste of time in the first place. But a different kind of reality series, the survival test Eden (C4), turns out to have a valuable political lesson for us: ‘Civilisation is fragile.’
it doesn’t take much to tip a community into chaos. And when leadership and discipline are weak, bullying takes over.
After the year-long project ended, one of the 23 campers who attempted to live entirely on their own resources in the remote scottish highlands admitted: ‘We went a bit feral.’
That’s a colossal understatement. Feral just means ‘wild and savage’. You could say newsreader Jon snow, for example, went a bit feral at Glastonbury when he danced around chanting ‘F*** the Tories!’
This lot weren’t feral, they’d gone full-blown Lord Of The Flies. The violent collapse of their society is documented over five nights this week. it started with food theft and a mass rebellion — don’t be surprised if, by Friday, they have started their own cult religion and impaled the heads of unbelievers on poles in the forest.
We saw the intriguing start to this experiment last August. i found it thought-provoking television, and asked why, with 45 fixed cameras in the camp, plus a professional TV crew and everyone carrying their own portable recorders, Channel 4 didn’t schedule a weekly update throughout the year.
Now we know. The chaos was so bad that producers must have feared Eden — with people sick from hunger — was on the point of complete disintegration.
screening that footage must have seemed too risky. All the production team could do was wait, and plan to edit the mess into some sort of narrative when it was all over . . . while praying that no one turned cannibal.
Much of the focus in the first episode was on 41-year-old Anton, a loner with an attention- seeking streak. he fantasised about winning the group’s adoration by single-handedly catching enough food to feed the camp on secret solo fishing expeditions.
Aggressive one moment, tearful the next, he seemed too unstable for the challenge. Why the group didn’t kick him out for stealing from the precious stocks of tinned fruit is a mystery. What will they do next?
For unlimited protein, the sur- vivalists could simply have tucked into scotland’s infinite supply of midges.
scientist Dr sarah Beynon and her boyfriend, chef Andy holcroft, are bound to have some tasty recipes. The Bug Grub Couple (BBC1) saw them serving up grasshopper vol au vents and pan-fried locusts in honey and chilli, followed by insect burgers, cricket cookies and black ant pavlova. i bet that tickles as it goes down.
Their argument that insects are an eco-friendly source of nutrition, because growing grubs takes much less energy than rearing cattle for beef, seemed to make sense — until you realise that ‘mycoprotein’, or food such as Quorn made from fungus, is even more efficient.
Quorn might be tasteless, but at least it doesn’t have antennae and bulging eyes. Dr sarah was an evangelist for bugs, happily allowing cockroaches as big as cats to crawl over her arms. But the rest of us don’t look at mealworms and think, ‘Yummy! Pass the ketchup.’