The elder gods of British light-entertainment television are twinkly-eyed Davina McCall, Darth Vader-haired Claudia Winkleman and chortling cherubic chegwins Ant & Dec (legally considered one person because they share an ampersand).
These Old Ones, as TV occultists call them, have the whole presenting gig sewn up. There are no others. Stephen Mulhern is simply Ant sitting on Dec’s shoulders in a long coat; Graham Norton is just Claudia Winkleman when she removes her metallic hair helmet with a click; and Bradley Walsh doesn’t actually exist. (There’s a gas leak in your house. I’m sorry you have to find out like this.)
Consequently, McCall is so sought after as a TV property that on Stranded on Honeymoon Island (BBC One) she barely has to turn up. While the hunky residents must travel to this aforementioned archipelago beyond the reach of international law, McCall largely appears as an image projected on a two-dimensional iPad from which the assembled beefcakes receive their baffling instructions.
Receiving orders from a screen is a very of-the-moment idea. I’m not sure how far down an internet rabbit hole you need to be before Davina McCall appears to you, but I suspect she’s coming for us all eventually.
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Perhaps she is imprisoned on this two-dimensional screen much like the baddies in Superman II when they were trapped in the Phantom Zone. Indeed, much like the baddies in Superman II, Davina McCall has great power. To pull off presenting a show like this is a tricky task. It requires that the presenter to be neither too dismissive of the project (because we don’t want to be taken for idiots) nor too sincere (because we don’t want to be taken for idiots).
Davina has been so marinated in postmodern irony since her early days on MTV and her long stint on Big Brother that she is now thoroughly immune to it. She lives instead in a state of warm, serene post-ironic detachment. And thus she has arched, sceptical eyebrows that are in perfect emotional balance with kind, sincere eyes. She is, consequently, scepticere, which is a word I have just invented.
Her scepticerity is ideal for a programme in which a collection of lovelorn swells are forced to take a wife (it’s not a real marriage) and live in a bamboo house while wearing the ragged remains of a wedding ensemble, men in sleeveless tuxes and ripped shirts, women in shredded party frocks. (If I was on this show I would insist on wearing one of those barrels with braces worn by former tycoons in Depression times.)
It’s a postapocalyptic dystopia brought to you by the wedding-industrial complex that has already done so much to make weekends so tedious for thirtysomethings.
I think the participants are meant to look as if they’ve actually been shipwrecked after their wedding and not just as if they’ve bust out of their clothes because of their muscles, like both of the Hulks (Incredible and Hogan).
Sadly, this conceit is mere artifice. They’re not really shipwrecked. At no point does a lonely island buffin plead with the cold-hearted camera crew for help or attempt to eat a fellow islander, no matter how succulent and delicious that islander might appear. (The BBC Food website should include recipes.)
The truth is that Stranded on Honeymoon Island is not really a survival show so much as the latest attempt by television producers to destroy the institution of marriage with dubious legality, ludicrously short engagements, endless temptations and constant surveillance. They probably should have gone with the title Sexy Panopticon.
On Wednesday’s episode, for example, the assembled citizens of the United Group of Hunks, aka Ugh, sit on beanbags (presumably woven from grass) and watch a huge television screen (whittled from coconuts) on which they can see each other’s first dates with people other than their ersatz spouses.
These dalliances are from the ancient past many, many days ago when these muscly marriagables were young and free and single. Based on this new information, some of them begin to doubt the health of their non-legally-binding marriages while others speak like gnomic grandparents about what it takes to make a relationship work.
They all send messages to one another via notes in bottles, which is, apparently, the main communication technology on the island. (Some places in Ireland have worse connectivity, in my experience.) They also fire a flare into the air when they are ready for a divorce, which is far more dramatic than just emailing a lawyer (and which doesn’t work so well when you are indoors).
The speed at which this bouquet of buffins are flying through engagement, marriage and divorce means I fully expect them to have adult kids and a pension by tonight’s episode.
If I was a childish trillionaire and I owned these amorous isles I would consider introducing an alien xenomorph to the equation, for science. Alien: Earth (Disney+) is Noah Hawley’s serialised TV take on the Ridley Scott film franchise, and, as he did with his spin-off of the Coen brothers’ Fargo, Hawley uses it as an excuse to remix all sorts of sci-fi concepts and tropes from Scott’s wider oeuvre. (One alien species even resembles the comedy alien from the Alien scriptwriter Dan O’Bannon’s earlier film Darkstar.)
Hawley positions one character, Boy Kavalier, the child-prodigy founder of a tech company, as an antagonist. Why is he the baddie? One: he has uploaded the brains of sick children to robots, in the process creating something man has dreamed of for thousands of years: very annoying robots. Two: he runs the entire planet in conjunction with four other totalitarian corporations (Weyland Yutani, Google, Flahavans, the Happy Pear). Three: he has stolen a bunch of terrifying alien specimens from a crashed spacecraft and is keeping them in a small, understaffed lab overseen by a creepy android.
His counterpoint to these arguments? Chill out! It’ll probably be fine!
I agree with him. For once, I would like to see a show in which a character’s decision to play God works out well for everyone involved. It’s certainly the principle by which Silicon Valley actually operates. I imagine the likes of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk watch shows like this very differently from the rest of us.
“Go down that dark corridor alone!” I imagine them shouting at the screen, and, “Don’t destroy those alien eggs! Take them home with you!” and, “Don’t post guards at the door of your lab filled with dangerous aliens! There’s surely no need.”
Alien: Earth is not as good a reimagining of the source material as Fargo, but it’s still a good old-fashioned sci-fi show where the characterisation is solid, the concepts are interesting and the aliens are scary. My favourite character is the tiny googly alien eye with tentacles (played by Timothée Chalamet, I believe), who slithers around the place looking for a human host to control, a much more harmonious marriage than any featured in Stranded on Honeymoon Island.
