“I have added around ten per cent more optimism to my worldview”
What happens when you take a comedian out of his comfort zone and put him on Celebrity Island with Bear Grylls? Terrible and enlightening things, says Mark Watson, ahead of his MW Tour gig in Dumfries
During the month of May I had the misfortune to be stranded on an island, thousands of miles from home, unable to contact any of my loved ones, and forced to forage for food and water. Except it wasn’t misfortune: I was one of ten idiots who agreed to participate in Bear Grylls’ Celebrity Island. In this light entertainment show, the noted survivalist abandons a party of minor luminaries in a godforsaken dump for 28 days, only resurfacing as part of the final broadcast in order to deliver salutary observations like ‘at this point, the celebs are in danger of suffering major organ breakdown’.
What did I learn, you might ask, from the experience of being brutally stripped of the main things which hold my life together: my phone, onlyjust-acceptable quantities of red wine, baths? And – you might also ask – are you able to format some of these lessons in an agreeable, fun-to-read way? For example, given that your current tour takes you to destinations beginning with the letters M and W (your initials), might you be able to start alternating paragraphs with those letters? It’s your lucky day. Here, presented in an alphabetically frivolous manner, are some of the main things I took away from Celebrity Island – other than a level of mosquito-bite damage for which there is no word beginning with M, W, or anything else.
More is sometimes more
It’s popularly claimed these days that ‘less is more’; that we could all benefit from stripping down our lives to the essentials. Lifestyle sections quite frequently carry pieces by people who’ve thrown all their belongings in the Atlantic and gone to live on a 30-square-metre rock, and claim to be the happiest they’ve ever been. While I’m sure it’s true that our attachment to trashy disposables is harmful to our mental health, what emerges from being on a desert island is that we should also be enormously grateful for the comfort and affluence of our society. Being able to eat in restaurants, or bomb around the country on trains, or hold a billion songs in the palm of your hand – these are astonishing blessings of our age and of western society. To put it a slightly more robust way: next time someone bangs on about how they’ve realised ‘we don’t need all this stuff ’, send them to a barren, mosquito-infested hellhole and see if they’ve changed their tune when they return.
We can do more than we thought
Pushing yourself beyond your supposed limits leads you to realise that those limits were all in your mind. That’s the sort of insight that people like Bear Grylls have based an industry on, and so it’s slightly chastening to admit that it does indeed bear fruit as a philosophy: at least up to a point. I went into the TV programme with an exceptionally low estimation of my capacities, mental and physical. Despite being removed by the health and safety team in the final week, jabbering in half-sentences and writhing like a prisoner in irons, I would have to conclude
“Sheer bloodymindedness can persuade your system to override common sense: not forever, but at least for a bit”