Eden has gone from boring reality TV to a real-life Paradise Lost
After ITV2’S Love Island romped to its inevitable conclusion last month, I was worried about what I was going to do with myself in the evenings.
Luckily, Channel 4 has stepped into the breach by deciding to resurrect their short-lived reality/survival television series, Eden.
The show launched last year and was trumpeted as a new kind of anthropological experiment whereby 26 individuals would be deposited in a remote part of Scotland and left to their own devices for a year.
The hope was that they would build a new community and explore man’s fundamental need to survive, perhaps growing some nice organic runner beans before joining hands and singing a rousing chorus of Kumbaya around a campfire. But it didn’t quite turn out like that.
The show was axed after viewing figures plummeted and the most frequent complaint was that the contestants didn’t really seem to do anything worth watching.
It turns out that staring at someone weeding a vegetable patch for hours on end is not vastly entertaining television. Who knew?
Now Channel 4 has decided to air five one-off programmes of heavily edited footage, which reveal that things all went a bit Lord of the Flies. Instead of coming together and forming a utopian new way of life, far away from mobile phones and rush-hour commutes, the contestants began turning on each other.
A former Army officer called Jack decided that the 100 days’ worth of dry food provisions they’d been given by the production team could actually be made to last much longer and he introduced rationing, which meant that everyone was malnourished to the brink of exhaustion.
The men started telling the women that they’d have to do the washing-up and leave the manly jobs like chopping wood to those with bigger biceps. There were punch-ups and moonshine parties.
A bearded man called Anton built his own hut and was promptly shunned. Eventually he was kicked out by the other contestants because he’d eaten some apricots and they thought he had “aggressive” eyes.
Truly, the only thing that they could have done to make Anton feel less welcome was to put a bell round his neck and make him wear a sandwichboard with “I’m a Social Pariah” painted on it in big purple letters.
I love reality television, but even I have to concede that Eden might be a bit too real for comfort.