The Island is marooned in the dark ages
Poor Bear Grylls is never far from controversy. In 2007, the adventurer and television presenter was accused of deceiving the viewer after it was revealed that he was staying in hotels, not under the stars, as his series Born Survivor would have it. Then last year, Channel 4’s The Island with Bear Grylls, which challenged a group of men to survive on an uninhabited desert island, was rightly criticised for excluding women from the experiment. Survival expert Lisa Fenton said at the time: “Women are every bit as cut out for this stuff as men. It is sexism and it’s deeply rooted.” Someone at Channel 4 was listening. The second series, which airs this week (Wednesday and Thursday, 9pm) has 14 women taking part. Again the series asks whether, stripped of 21st-century luxuries, men and women can rediscover their primal instincts and learn to survive miles from civilisation? How disappointing, then, to find that this series is every bit as sexist as its predecessor. And worst of all, it doesn’t even realise it. In a recent interview, Grylls said that “it’s fantastic to be able to blow some of these gender stereotypes out of the water and for everyday, regular women to show their strengths”. But by putting the women on a different island from the men, the programme has created a rift that need never have been there. Of course a proportion, however small, of the contestants will do something that is considered “typical” to their gender. By segregating the sexes and creating such an undiluted social situation, these actions are further highlighted. And it is then that festering stereotypes and prejudices surface. We see 25-year-old hairdresser Jayde Lee cry over a broken nail; and a power struggle develops between two hulking alpha-males, Andy Bennett and Paul Hopkinson. But none of this tells us whether humans – men and women – could survive on a desert island. It just tells us that some women care about their nails and that some men have the ability to behave like prats. And from the glimpses of female flesh highlighted throughout, I suppose we are also to draw the conclusion that women are to be viewed as sex symbols, even when they are in a precarious situation in which the priorities are making fire and finding water. Here is a programme pretending to contribute to the gender debate, while actually reinforcing its most outdated assumptions. The disappointing thing is that Grylls, despite being a character straight out of a rattling good Boy’s Own Paper, has made an attempt to do something which subverts his air of rather old-fashioned masculinity with this series. And yet he still finds himself resorting to gender stereotypes. “When pushed to the limits of human endurance, will it be brute power or mental strength that wins the day?” Grylls asks in the opening programme. It is difficult to comprehend why he is categorising men and women in such a reductive manner. It reminds me of that longrunning ITV game show The Krypton Factor, in which women were given a head start in the physical challenges. But that show first aired in 1977. Television has moved on. It was back in 2001 when ITV launched Survivor, in which two tribes battled to survive on a remote island. On Survivor, male and female contestants started on an even footing and were split equally across the two tribes. The viewer watched as the sexes – gasp! – worked together. A woman, Charlotte Hobrough, won the first series. The Island with Bear Grylls is setting back a debate that has already been resolved. Rupert Hawksley