I once hoped Bear Grylls was a programme about an ursine barbecue enthusiast. Sadly, this was not the case. Bear Grylls is, in fact, a sadomasochistic human survivalist with a vestigial camera crew, two remote Pacific islands and 28 human lives to toy with (The Island, Wednesday, Thursday, Channel 4). “I’m abandoning 14 women to fend for themselves on a desert island,” he announces grimly. “They will be utterly alone.”
Grylls is just the latest in a string of deranged despots with islands – Dr Moreau, Charles J Haughey, The Barclay Brothers and Paul Brady – and like them, he maroons regular people there and, presumably, hunts them for sport like in The Running Man or Dalkey.
For Grylls, modern life is just too damn easy and he wants to make it hard again. His ideal audience are malnourished, hallucinating cave folk who have built their televisions out of moss and rabbit carcasses.
“It takes an extreme situation to find out what people are really made of,” he says. And as the programme progresses, it transpires that people are largely made of “goo” and “blood” and “pus” and “tears”.
This series, Grylls has separated his castaways into two groups on two separate islands, one male and one female. They have fishing equipment and cameras, and their survival depends on what sustenance they can wrest from nature. I’m also pretty sure he expects each group to defy science and successfully breed.
Various islanders introduce themselves.
“I’m a paramedic,” says Barney and everyone cheers.
“I am a doctor,” says Piers and everyone cheers.
“I am a website consultant,” says Kyle and everyone looks at their feet (ironically, in ancient Celtic societies “website consultant” came just below the chief and bard in the tribal hierarchy).
It’s clear from the outset that not all participants are aware of what they’re letting themselves in for. “I’m angry with Bear Grylls,” one woman concludes after a bit of starvation.
She, like me, doubtless expected to spend six weeks sampling smoky dishes prepared by a furry foodie.
The alpha on the male island is Paul who tells us that he has a newborn baby and a stressful job and wants to get away from “the day-to-day bullshit” (presumably the mother of his child is on the female island; is there a baby island?). Paul takes control, dragging the bedraggled males to a beach where he supervises the creation of a “camp”. Then they mock the gods by mastering fire.
Women’s island march
Over on the “women’s island” a woman called Fi says, “I sometimes have Hitler tendencies”, and drags half the camp on a death march through the jungle. By the end of the episode the women are separated, have no shelter, no fresh water and no heat. On the plus side they get to eat roots. “Not as nice as ‘normal food’,” observes one woman.
Eventually all the castaways are depressed, dehydrated, squabbling and threatening desertion. Vultures are literally circling. Bear Grylls looks on approvingly. There can only be two satisfying outcomes: (a) the islanders cobble together a brave new world, build an internet out of bamboo and train monkeys to cater to their every whim. “Today you will be with me in my garden, which is paradise,” Grylls will say; or (b) everyone starves to death.
“That’s what you get,” Bear will say, shaking his head. “That’s what you get. For being s***.”
Over on RTÉ they’ve made a right-wing reality TV show out of youth unemployment, just as, in the past, they did with other social problems (the housing bubble; Craig Doyle). The Unemployables (Thursday, RTÉ 2) presumes that what keeps thousands from lovely, lovely jobs (not nasty, futureless zero-hour-contract servitude) is fecklessness, lack of sticktoitiveness and a dearth of celebrity mentorship, not macroeconomics, inequality, or the fact that work for the young is a meagre thing compared to the protected sinecures of the past.
The mentors are light-entertainment Ayn Rand-impersonator Jennifer Maguire, and Darren Kennedy, who is controlled by a furry, alien symbiote latched to his scalp (fashion editor’s note: that’s his hair). Maguire learned her economic theory from Sir Alan Sugar on The Apprentice, who learned it from Tina Turner in Mad Max III: Beyond Thunderdome. Sweet, smiley Kennedy gets his directions directly from the hive on Rigel 7 where his quiff was spawned.
This week’s “unemployables” have their mettle tested in a series of service jobs. There’s Chloe, a likeable frizzy-haired dance enthusiast frightened of rejection, and Jamie, a charming fantasist who prefers playing video games to distributing his invisible CV. It’s a sort of Schrödinger’s CV; it may or may not exist.
Jennifer Maguire calls him “a spoofer”. And yet, watching her growing exasperation, it seems that Jamie is a true hero of the people, frustrating all attempts by capitalism to alienate him and exploit his labour (I may be reading too much Marxism into Jamie’s motivations).
Maguire and Kennedy mean well with their apolitical self-help and Jamie and Chloe do find employment (so two down, 350,000 to go). Chloe becomes a receptionist. And Jamie is, as you know, a fully-fledged member of the Workers’ Party and director general of RTÉ.
