We fought CLASS WAR on the beaches!
Take a group of proud working-class folk, another of plummy-voiced professionals and strand them on a desert island for a TV experiment. The result?
OH dEAR. This was categorically not what Churchill meant when he said ‘ we shall fight on the beaches’.
The setting was a tropical paradise, far from home, but the warriors were very British. On one side was the group dubbed Camp Snob, an elite group of high-earning professionals each taking home an average of £100,000 a year.
Members included doctor and medical lecturer James, 33, who lives in the West Midlands; Shereen, 48, a GP from Gibraltar; gynaecologist Ali, 29, from London; Tan, 27, a fundraising manager from Cambridge; businesswoman Lorna, 50, who lives for part of the year in Marbella, and for the other half in well-heeled Harrogate; and a fine art dealer called Barnes Thomas, 32, who seemed to have stepped straight out of the pages of Jeeves and Wooster.
On the other side of the beach were a motley crew who named themselves Camp Peasant. This lot included a builder, a glazier and a woman called Mercedes, from the travelling community, who worked in a scrap metal business and could drive a forklift truck. From the off, it was war. Class war. ‘It all kicked off when we heard glazier Phil, the leader of the other team, shouting from about a mile away,’ says Barnes with a shudder. ‘He was all testosterone and alpha male, all that nonsense. I remember one of the first things he said was “f*** me, you lot are posh”.
‘So from the very beginning we had been judged as being posh. It was confrontational from the off. We were all very quick to judge each other. Too quick, in hindsight.
‘They were a vision, this medley of characters all walking down the beach as if they had been dragged through a hedge backwards. They were very yokel — I mean, vocal. I remember thinking, God we are in for trouble here. It was as if they were arriving in Benidorm expecting the beach loungers to be put out for them.’
Who are these people? Well, they are the contestants in the new series of The Island, the survival show presented by adventurer Bear Grylls. In simpler days, this show involved contestants simply being marooned on exotic shores, tasked with building rafts and shelters, and trying to avoid being eaten by alligators.
In more recent years the production team have gone all-out to manufacture the sorts of clashes that even fights with alligators can’t provide. Various groups have been set against each other — men against women, then young against old.
THIS
year, two groups have been pitted against each other, but divided on class and earnings. One group has been picked from the highest earners in society and from seemingly privileged backgrounds. The other group all earn less than the average British wage of £ 27,000, and are unashamedly salt-of-the-earth.
All are pitched unceremoniously into the sea (‘I belly-flopped straight in,’ admits Mercedes, cheerily) from Grylls’s boat and told to get on with it.
The show, according to Bear, ‘sets out to look at the issue of wealth disparity, and whether living with vastly different economic circumstances at home has an influence on our ability to cope in the wild’. Hmm.
So do sparks fly when the two sides meet? Well, of course they do. We’ve had a sneak preview of the early episodes and can report that it does all go a bit Lord Of The Flies, via Lord’s Cricket Ground.
Barnes and Mercedes — outwardly the poshest and the plebbiest of the cast members respectively — catch up when they pitch up for our photoshoot together.
Barnes is a tweedy type from Cornwall with a clipped accent and a penchant for loafers with tassles. He openly admits he sneered at the strangers he met on that beach, Mercedes among them.
‘ Yes, I was judgmental. I jumped to conclusions, 100 per cent. I put my hands up to it. I’ll wave the white flag today, but in that environment there was no stopping it, from both sides. We immediately got each other’s backs up.’
He does insist that he tried to be a peacemaker: ‘I did that very English thing where I was polite to everyone. I was trying to be nice. But they were so bloody lazy!’
Mercedes — the chalk to his cheese — agrees that there was ‘always going to be war’.
‘It was confrontational. That side weren’t friendly. They weren’t welcoming. I felt they looked down on us from the start.
‘I remember the first time I met James, who was a great big GP. He never said two words to me. I thought, well, I wouldn’t like to come and see you if I needed a doctor. And Shereen. She’s a doctor, too. She was rude. She ended up shouting at me. All those airs and graces, but no manners. I might not have much, but I do have manners.’
And were she and her team lazy?
‘No! But I admit that when the rows started I just took myself off. I didn’t want to get involved. If they were all going to just be shouting at each other — no way! I went and had a dip in the sea.’
Suffice to say, this is car-crash TV. For the first time in the show’s history the two disparate groups actually refuse to join forces and, by the end of the first episode, they have set up separate camps.
For the first two weeks of the experiment there is overt hostility. Mercedes, 27, says it was the rows that highlighted the class differences. It was like trying to mix up EastEnders and The Archers.
‘Think about it,’ she says. ‘If two people go into Harrods and have a row there, it will most likely be discreet.
‘But if you go to a corner pub in Brixton and you say a wrong word, you can have pints flying across the room. It’s more rough- and- ready. That’s the difference.’
Since filming stopped, Barnes and Mercedes have visited each other’s homes, and make a hilarious double act as they relay the tales.
‘I’m not allowed to call them caravans, am I? I have to say wagons,’ Barnes says when they are discussing his first visit to Mercedes’s extended family in Walton-on-Thames.
She humours him. ‘Well, you can say caravan, but we call them wagons.’ It’s a moot point anyway. ‘ We have the wagons, but actually we live in a house. A lot of travel-
lers do now. When you have a business, you can’t exactly just up and leave.’
Their life stories rather spectacularly illustrate how dangerous it can be to make assumptions about someone based on their salary, accent or background.
Barnes said his biggest gripe was the constant assumption that he was a ‘posh boy who went to private school’. ‘I didn’t, actually. My family were farmers. I went to the local school. It really annoyed me when some of the others used to say that because I was well- off I didn’t understand hardship. I’d think, you know nothing about my life.’
Conversely, Mercedes did go to private school.
‘ It’s not common with travellers, but my mum and dad worked their a***s off to pay for my education. Some parents would expect me to be having a Big Fat Gypsy Wedding and have three kids, but mine saw the importance of education.’
Her team included Ben, 37, a builder from East Sussex; Erance, 31, a customer service adviser from Leeds; Laura, a nurse from Newcastle upon Tyne; and unemployed Sammy, 24, from Guildford, who has just finished a business psychology degree.
Not forgetting, of course, 29-yearold Phil, from Peckham, South-East London, and the self-styled ‘geezer’ of the group. From the outset, Phil says, he could ‘see the differences’: ‘I’m outgoing and lairy and people can think I am too much. The other team weren’t used to having a working-class geezer amongst them.’
BarNES would put it a different way. He says he couldn’t bear Phil and his hostility. ‘We all started off badly. We all made some flippant remarks. There was a lot of judgment, from both sides. There was no stopping it. We immediately got each other’s backs up. From then, it looked like there would be a war.’
He insists that things could have been smoothed over, but that Phil was resistant to any thawing in relations.
‘Most of the rest of us got over that and tried to build bridges. By week three I thought we were getting along. There was interaction between us. Or as I said to them, “I will have tea and play games with you, but there is no bloody way I am living with you.” Phil stuck with his prejudices. He wasn’t going to back down. He kept going on about it. It was his idea to call their camp Camp Peasant and ours Camp Snob.
‘I took them to task over that. It kept the whole class thing going.’
another key antagonist in the early stages is Shereen, another medic from Camp Snob, who quickly gets the nickname Queen Shereen.
Shereen’s biggest qualification for the task in hand? Her upbringing, she says: ‘ I was brought up by Irish nuns in a convent from the age of four, so if you can survive that you can survive anything.’
Shereen might be a formidable sort in a crisis — she’s strident, opinionated and convinced that she knows better than anyone else how to cover a bamboo frame with leaves — but is she the sort you want to be stranded on a desert island with?
‘Well, she’s certainly hands- on,’ says Barnes. ‘and she gets things done. But she’s bats**t crazy.’
Mercedes is not a fan of Queen Shereen. ‘ She dominated everything. You were afraid to give an opinion in her presence. She was very blunt, and very rude.’
There are actually four medics in the ‘posh’ team, and a nurse in the ‘pleb’ one, which might sound very sensible for a survival show, but Mercedes — the straightest talker of the operation — disagrees.
‘When anyone was injured, they all piled in. You had five reviews on one bloody cut. James would go on about it scientifically, as if he was writing a paper on it. and I’d be saying, “I just want a plaster!” ’
Who the winners will be in the war between Camp Snob and Camp Peasant remains to be seen. Since all 16 have made it off the island, we can assume only limited casualties. The class war may well rage on, however, long after this lot have got the sand out of their shoes.
The new series of The Island starts tonight at 9pm on Channel 4.