The REAL Serpent of Eden
The male stars of a ‘back to nature’ reality show have been blasted as sexist brutes. But wait till you read what they’ve got to say about the ‘spiteful, duplicitous’ woman they claim was...
HALF an hour has passed in the company of Glenn Moores, but he has not yet asked me to wear a pinny or do the washing up, and I’ve done no hoovering at all. This is quite a relief, as I find myself in the company of a man known across the nation not so much as a sexist as a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal, a purebred misogynist who believes that women should retreat to the utility room.
True, the floral wallpaper and twee patterned curtains hanging in his mock Tudor home don’t scream ‘oaf’. There are no animal carcasses swinging from the ceilings.
But there were plenty on view in Eden: Paradise Lost, last week’s Channel 4 series in which 23 strangers attempted to live ‘off-grid’ in the Highlands for a year.
Viewers were transfixed as Glenn, 36, and four other men not only butchered the meat themselves but were shown making crude jokes and discussing how to share out the womenfolk in threesomes before demanding they stick to ‘girl jobs’ such as gardening and washing up.
Many will no doubt have agreed with the verdict of a withering rival participant, who described them as the most ‘sexist, racist, homophobic men’ she had ever met.
These were the damning words of 31-year-old artist Katie Tunn, who then continued her assault in a number of excoriating press and broadcast interviews in the run-up to last week’s series.
Today, it is no surprise that Glenn is eager to set the record straight. Clearly on the back foot in the unfolding gender war, he is speaking for the first time since the controversial shows were aired – and takes aim at Katie, whom he accuses of orchestrating a sustained campaign against the boys, despite her own shortcomings on the show.
This is a woman, he claims, whose main contribution to the desperate fight for survival was producing ‘art works’ made out of heather and whose idea of foraging for food was collecting bits of seaweed.
‘We all had a horrific time at Eden. Why the hell is Katie leaping on the bandwagon now when she knows what was shown is not the full picture?’ he says. ‘She’s turned into a sort of persecutor-in-chief.
‘She kept having problems with certain people. It’s like she’s still grinding the axe.
‘She’s quite spiteful. This is her taking a last chance to get the knife in. Katie said to me in there that she would like to work in TV off the back of this.
‘I think she’d like a career in media. She blogs, she likes the attention. If Katie can use this to get more fame, she will.
‘Katie made a lot of noise about things she didn’t like and she didn’t like us. She would come round to our house for cups of tea. But when you look back at her private videos, she was slagging us off from day one. It was duplicitous.’
Katie declined to respond to these charges. But she is not the only target of Glenn’s ire.
‘Look at the way they’ve edited it,’ he adds. ‘We’re the pantomime villains in Channel 4’s production. The Glenn you see on TV is not a person my girlfriend knows. It’s not a person I recognise either.
‘I gave a year of my life – blood, sweat and tears – to build something fresh, only for it to be twisted into the diabolical, highly edited trash Channel 4 produced. It’s soul destroying and I’m a bit shellshocked by it.’ (For their part, Channel 4 says that the footage of the boys’ antics speaks for itself.)
Indeed, he is sufficiently outraged to have lodged a complaint with broadcasting regulator Ofcom and says that three other contestants are planning to do the same.
A spokeswoman for Channel 4 said: ‘All the contributors were made aware of the premise of the programme and the resulting series is a fair and accurate account of what took place.’
So what lies behing this very heated ding-dong in ‘Eden’? And who is the real serpent? It all began when Glen saw a Facebook post requesting willing participants to build a self-sufficient community on the Ardnamurchan peninsula, and jumped at the chance.
He had degree in ecology and had learned how to stalk and butcher deer after a stint working as a stalker on The Garynahine Estate on Lewis. He also longed for adventure.
‘It was my childhood dream to live in the woods,’ he says. ‘I thought here’s my chance to do that and hunt, shoot and fish and survive. Keo Films said they were going to make a 16-part documentary. They promised it wasn’t reality TV. We went into it naively.’
The show initially ran for four episodes last year but was cancelled when ratings dropped to 800,000 viewers, although the community knew nothing, and the cameras kept rolling. Then, last week the remaining footage from the yearlong experiment was condensed into five episodes and rebranded Eden: Paradise Lost. Certainly, the picture that it portrayed was more Lord Of The Flies than rural idyll. The community was given enough dry rations for 100 days, but Army officer Jack decided they should eek it out for the year. The group had livestock, but couldn’t kill and eat them for several months and were given seeds to plant. Glenn lost four stone in six months. ‘It was stressful. We literally did starve at one point,’ Glenn says. ‘The garden didn’t produce anywhere near enough food. The show portrayed it as Rachel’s fault but Rachel did her absolute
‘It’s like she’s still grinding the axe – she’s spiteful’
best. The production company accidentally left a soil report. It said there was no way we could grow vegetables in that environment and “Unless you do something drastic, you’ll have a Castaway-style revolt on your hands”. You dug down 30cm and you hit rock.’
The group quickly discovered they were also ill-equipped. ‘The production company gave us antique tools because they wanted the vibe to be romantic,’ Glenn says. ‘We used them and they broke. No one had experience of cutting down trees.
‘At one point, there was about 12 to 15 dangerous trees around. No one bothered to wear the protective clothing and goggles. It’s amazing no one died.’
The production company made no comment on these claims, although it is understood they dispute that the soil or the equipment were unsuitable.
‘A number of times, people wanted to leave and walked to the gate,’ Glenn claims. ‘The production guys would go: “Oh no, you’re doing so well. We can see you presenting Countryfile.”’
Nevertheless, conditions were so harsh and unforgiving that after six months, the group had dwindled from 23 to 11. Growing ever more fractious, they split into two groups: The Valley Boys, including Glenn, and the Progressives, which consisted of Katie, the rest of the girls and Oli, an embedded cameraman. Bitter arguments followed, chiefly over who should do which jobs.
Valley Boy and plumber Titch said in one episode: ‘Girls can’t carry logs, girls can’t cut wood. Girls can weed in the garden and do other stuff that I don’t want to do. I don’t want to do any washing up and keep the camp clean.’
‘I can see how it looks bad,’ Glenn says. ‘But he’s a straight-talking bloke from Yorkshire. There was so much political correctness from Katie and Josie that he almost said it to be provocative. Titch built the entire kitchen, the shower and most of the community build. He was made to look bad but without him that community wouldn’t have survived.
‘Katie was supposed to be the forager. She brought in some seaweed and that was it. She spent most of her time doing watercol- ours and making statues out of heather. She would often say: “I came here to bring culture and art to the community.”’
Most dramatically, Katie has also spoken out about what she claims was a plot by the boys to oust the women in something they described as ‘Operation C***’.
Today, Glenn rather shamefacedly admits to suggesting the plot but says it was taken out of context. ‘The wood team – girls and boys – hadn’t chopped enough wood for the kitchen and had gone to the beach,’ he insists.
‘I came into a conversation about how lazy they were. Someone said we should starve them out and I said it was time for Operation C***. It was a throwaway comment and never even a thing and not just about girls.’
Besides, he says it wasn’t just the men who indulged in sexist banter. ‘The girls made a set of top trumps about the boys that included things like cuteness and intelligence. Just imagine if the guys had done it. They’d also sit in the garden and talk about who they’d shag.
‘At other times, the girls were happy to either start or engage in those jokey conversations.’
Now, with the experiment over, Glenn is back at his IT job but says it has taken him months to recover psychologically.
‘You look back and think was it worth doing?’ he says. ‘I was in a good relationship, I gave up my job and came back to a load of debt – we were paid expenses.
‘If any of us had known it had gone from a 16-part documentary to a five-episode reality TV show that doesn’t give people the right to reply and omits the context of the story, we’d have walked out.’
‘She spent all her time making heather statues’