Survival hunks? This lot can’t last a day without begging for a pizza
WHEN David Attenborough was the head of BBC2 in the Sixties, he toyed briefly with the idea of collecting a bunch of strangers to live together under the constant scrutiny of TV cameras, as a social experiment.
Pretty quickly he decided this would be unethical, and shelved the notion — thus staving off the invention of reality TV for about 30 years.
But if Sir David, the nearest thing telly has to a living saint, had pressed ahead with his plan, it would have been reality TV with a conscience, serious and psychological . . . not a bunch of silly show-offs.
At first glance, The Island With Bear Grylls (C4) looks like just another variation on I’m A Celeb or Big Brother. Ten ordinary blokes, aged 22 to 58, plus four experienced cameramen, are marooned on a rock in the South Seas and left to fend for themselves for six weeks.
When the series launched last year, there were suggestions it was fixed — the production company had imported edible wildlife onto the island for the castaways to hunt. They had also brought in a couple of caiman crocodiles to hunt the would-be Robinson Crusoes.
Worse, the cameramen were timeserved survivalists, the kind of Jungle Johnnies who can skin a snake in the time it takes to peel a banana.
Bear has learned from the criticism. This time, instead of a fake macho challenge, the show strives to be an experiment in psychology. The ten adventurers possess all the skills they need. There’s a doctor, a farmer, and two builders — you’d think they could set up a self- sufficient community in no time.
But what they don’t have is a leader. None of them has a clue about co- operation or delegation. They’re just a bunch of needy attention- seekers, the typical product of the Facebook era, and from the minute they arrived they were letting each other down.
Paul, a 36-year- old building site manager, announced he was going to find a beach to camp on, and plunged off through the rainforest, leaving the rest to straggle along behind.
When he found a shoreline, Paul fell to his knees and announced, his voice cracking with emotion, that it was the toughest thing he’d ever done.
He didn’t spare a thought for his team-mates, some of them still struggling through the undergrowth after darkness fell.
They were so hopelessly disorganised that after three days they still hadn’t managed to construct a shelter. Even more useless, it took them a day to make fire, with much rubbing of sticks, caveman style . . . until one of them worked out that his spectacles could focus the sun’s rays and start a blaze in seconds.
Within a day, the youngest man was begging to leave. ‘ I just really fancy a margherita pizza,’ he sobbed.
The second episode screens tonight: on a neighbouring island, Bear has marooned 14 women. Will the females succumb to posturing and cry-baby antics, too? This might just turn out to be an experiment worthy of Attenborough.
It was the feminine half of the Countryfile team, Ellie Harrison, who tackled all the manly stuff in Secret Britain (BBC1). She went pot-holing, and swam in an icecold glacial lake; her co-presenter, Adam Henson, confined himself to a spot of fly-fishing.
Even though she was wearing a rubber wetsuit, that hilltop lake didn’t look too inviting. Ellie was barefoot, and there were leeches the size of boa constrictors at the water’s edge. Worse was her ordeal underground, squeezing through crevices and wriggling down gullies deep in the mountainside, just to see a cave of stalactites and stalagmites.
Ellie was miserable with claustrophobia: ‘I hate this, I absolutely hate it. I want to pass out with stress.’
The theme of this show, the first of three, wasn’t a bad one. Countryfile viewers had sent in suggestions of little- known beauty spots for Adam and Ellie to visit, and some of the sites, in the Brecon Beacons, were lovely.
But their research seemed rushed, and the script was trite and trivial. We didn’t learn much, and most of it was forgettable.
At least no one burst into tears and pleaded for pizza.