My own reality TV show in the tropics

EVERYONE’S heard of ITV’s Love I sland – the absorbing anthropological study that shows homosapiens at play during the mating season… Well, I’ve come up with an idea for a much more raunchy downmarket version which will have millions of viewers…. Um, changing channels as fast as they can.

It’s called Me Island and I’m probably going to have to admit that it’s not for TV. But as a radio programme or even better, a podcast, it would be great. The other working title is Getting To Kno w You I sland – and by “you” I mean yourself.

The idea came to me during a violent storm one night this week as I gazed out over wild tropical seas crashing on a white sand beach under a great white moon. A hot wind was beating against the mosquito screens and I lay there alone in a cottage perched on a remote island sea cliff, watching the palm trees dance like Dervishes in the angry Trade Winds.

It doesn’t often happen that I feel lonely, but I did in that moment as unseen equatorial seabirds cried

somewhere out among the skerries beyond the distant booming reef and the tree frogs in the rainforest behind the cottage piped a million solitary songs.

And all the time that great white moon bore down through the waving palms and drilled through the mosquito screens to reveal my aloneness as I sprawled there, hot and sweating at midnight, on the huge empty white bed. My only consolation was that on the same isle there were six other journalists lying alone in their cottages dotted around the shores or high up on the wind-beaten bluffs.

All of them alone. All of them incommunicado with the rest of the world because… And here is the big truth that will make Me I sland the great hit that it should surely be…

Because there was no wi-fi signal on that island.

Now, there will be a few old farmers and other rural agrarian types in places like Exmoor or Dartmoor who might read this and say: “So what?”

But if you take away the ability of a smartphone to work, most modern folk will begin to suffer withdrawal symptoms. Those under 40 years of age will embark upon a digital version of cold turkey.

However, that phrase is not really fit for purpose here because it conjures images of great angst, or the living embodiment of Edvard Munch’s depiction of TheScream. Whereas the withdrawal of digital connectivity can induce altogether different emotions and sensations.

People become somehow softer in manner. More reflective. More thoughtful and considered. They seem to have more time, so everything becomes a little slower. Until it almost stops altogether.

And that is the moment when the participants in the programme or podcast will suddenly begin to say: “Blimey! This is me.”

At which point in the TV version a cacophony of klaxons will drown the nists in the drama – openly wept. He was recounting how the pressure he had put himself under during his career had taken him to the very edge – and to a collapse in his mental health. But it was not this that eventually made him cry – it was telling the camera how much he missed it, how much he missed his friends, the cameraderie, “the partnerships”. It was so sad.

Reaching the top is a tough thing, but what happens once you’ve got there is even harder to deal with.

It reminded me of a lot of my services friends. Most of them have sorted themselves out now, but for night birds and tree frogs and the presenters Ant and Dec will run into that lonely cottage on those tropical shores making jokes and wondering how the “new you” is going to be able to cope with all its newfound celebrity.

“Me Island has weaved it’s magic good and proper!” The tall one will beam in his Geordie drawl.

“You came in here thinking you knew yourself!” The small one will add in his high-pitched voice, peering down at the newfound man on the bed. “How d’ya feel now that your digitally-detoxed soul has had time to really know hizself?”

In the real-life version you just lie there feeling a little uncomfortable and wondering how it will all end. You miss your family and friends and you miss the connected world which helps you to sweep any midnight darkness into light.

You carry on lying there alone under the all-exposing beam of that big white tropical moon, thinking: “There are bits of me that are unhappy or depressed. But I have become very good at hiding them from myself, or even ignoring the fact that they exist at all.” At least, that was my unscientific conclusion after spending time on Me Island this week. But then, I am a cunning old fox who’s learned to survive the knocks and blows of time, and I live a life at home which is probably more connected with reality than it is with anything digitally induced.

Whereas the young journalists on that island live in cities where they spend at least part of every waking minute on their smartphones. After a few days you could see the beneficial change of the digital-detox beginning to wash over them.

They’d become far more relaxed than the individuals I’d first met at the airport.

All through the long hot tropical hours they did yoga, they swam, they lay in hammocks alone in their cottages and read old-fashioned books. And they looked all the happier for it.

Several of them cried when it came time to leave. I liked it there too, but was quite happy to wave goodbye to the darker me. I left him lying up there on that big white bed above the white sand beach, under the huge white tropical moon.

A cacophony of klaxons

will drown the night birds and tree frogs and Ant and Dec will run in