Circle of hell that says it all about dim millennials
SOMETIMES it is hard to loathe young people with social media fixations, but that is no reason not to try. Channel 4 has made things easier for us by rounding up the eight most annoying youngsters in the country and inviting them to take part in their new reality show, The Circle (10pm tonight) – surely short for Circle of Hell, which is what it feels like after five minutes.
I say youngsters. The Circlers are aged between 19 and 40, with an average age of 26 and a mental age that spirals much further, in some cases right down to single figures.
‘Oh my God. He loves tea! Just like me!’ screams 19-year-old contestant Aiden from Wakefield when she discovers that fellow contestant Mitchell, a 22-year- old bar supervisor from Norfolk, who describes himself as the ‘King of Tinder’, has a similar taste in hot beverages to hers. I mean, what are the chances?
The rules are simple in this new reality show, which is like a version of Big Brother for particularly dim millennials, or an inner city variety of Love Island sans tans.
The contestants apparently occupy a block of flats in West London, but they all live in separate apartments, never meet and can’t see or hear one another.
Their only means of communication is online, via a bespoke social media platform (it looks similar to Facebook) that Channel 4 has created for the show, which runs nearly every night over the next three weeks. On this social media platform they can send one another messages and pictures.
The object of the exercise is to win £50,000 prize money, and to do this Circlers must remain popular within the group (at the end of the first show they all rated each other out of five) and not get ‘blocked’ by being the least popular – which means instant dismissal and being replaced by another contestant.
In space no one can hear you scream and online, you are what you choose to share. As they select the photographs and edit their own profiles, just like on a dating site, the contestants within the Circle can be anyone they want to be. ‘Social media is the way you want the world to see you,’ is how estate agent Dan puts it. Already several contestants have proved themselves to be casually dissolute cheats, capable of lying and hiding behind flattering online identities in a bid to win the cash.
Gay Freddie, 20, from Essex, is pretending to be straight, and also – the utter cad! – that he is mourning a beloved pet.
‘I can’t stand animals, me, but I know I will gain votes by saying I have got a dead dog,’ he says. He’s decided to play it straight because he is ‘sick’ of being everyone’s gay best friend. ‘Even though you don’t get much camper than me,’ he says, strutting though the apartment in his footsies and screaming every time a message appears on his screen.
Genelle is a full-time mother to her baby girl, who she is keeping a secret. Sooner or later she is also going to tell the group that she is ‘pan- sexual’, because she doesn’t ‘see gender’.
Alex, 26, is pretending to be a woman (namely his own beautiful girlfriend Kate) to win over male contestants in the popularity contest, while model Sian, 19, from Hertford (‘I am not as stupid as I look’) is pretending to be a plain Jane version of herself.
In a breathtakingly cynical bid to make everyone like her more, Jennifer – a 40-year-old advertising executive from Newcastle – is pretending to be a 34-year- old paediatric oncologist. Why? Because nobody dislikes a kiddy cancer doctor, right?
She tells the cameras that she knows that this ruse is ‘immoral’ but I’m guessing she doesn’t know what that means, otherwise she wouldn’t be doing it in front of a television audience of millions.
As it turns out, Jennifer isn’t very popular when they all vote in The Circle, not because she is bogus, but because she commits the far bigger sin of being old and not up to speed with the meaningless bantz zipping along the Circle chat wires.
God! Remember the good old days when young people had to develop personalities and conversational skills to impress each other? Here they are like shortattention span robots, keen on the spite and the trite.
The messages the Circlers sent to each other are voice activated, which means they all speak in fluent emoji and punctuate their own quasi-literate sentences. ‘Like, how irritating is that exclamation mark question mark hashtag loser.’ ‘How are you finding your apartment smiley face question mark. Big eyes, laughing smile, dog face.’
TO be fair, C4 has spent money on the show and the editing is sharp. Watching these schemers interact with each other online may have its dramatic limitations, but it is bringing awareness to issues of trust with social media and helping people understand that it is a shallow world, riddled with fakery and deceit.
Here, the cruel act of catfishing – luring someone into a relationship by adopting a fictional online persona – has already been laid bare in all its sordid glory.
In The Circle we have had a guy who is gay pretending to be straight, flirting with a guy who is straight who is pretending to be a girl. The first episode ended with Alex (the one pretending to be his girlfriend Kate) and the duped Mitchell having a virtual dinner date and speaking to each other through screens. Alex began to feel a bit ill with all the deceit. He wasn’t the only one.