They probably don't get ITV in Tonga, but if they managed to pick it up with the aid of a coconut shell and bamboo satellite dish then the people behind Treasure Island will have been heartened by what was going on only a conch call away on the Survivor island this week.
On the whole - and they might want to turn the satellite dish to another channel for a moment - Survivor has been a disaster for ITV.
Hardly anybody has watched it. As television, Survivor lacks almost everything that Big Brother has - not least that show's sense of immediacy, with cameras around every corner. It even wants for the everyday banality that makes Big Brother so strangely addictive. Survivor is television in which people know they are missing all the good bits, with the tabloids relaying what's happening when the cameras aren't there. One contestant returned with tales of "nocturnal activity". Nocturnal activity! Big Brother has been yearning for "nocturnal activity" between its contestants so much that they've only just stopped short of piping corny 1970s music through the speakers and turning the heat up.
ITV hasn't even bothered to pretend that Survivor is being filmed in real time; there has been no sense of the show being truly live. Each Monday, Mark Austen, a presenter with the personality of a bored tortoise, appears on Survivor island to judge the games and snuff out a contestant's Flame of Minor Celebrity, or whatever it is that means someone has been voted off. He would appear out of the jungle with his mahogany tan and manicured stubble, a Kurtz in chinos. Three minutes after the show ends he would turn up anchoring ITV News at Ten, the tan this time a little more beech. This does not help.
But here's the thing: on Monday night, Survivor was great. Short of cannibalising each other, the five remaining contestants seem to have descended into just the kind of back-stabbing, paranoid idiocy that you would hope for. The Piggy of the piece was Eve, who hadn't even had her Flame of Tabloid Intrusion extinguished yet, but knew that the four remaining islanders had sealed her fate through a bit of "tactical voting" (i.e. backstabbing). She set about gaining revenge with a plan so fiendish that only the most diabolical of minds could have concocted it: she drank the last bottle of tomato ketchup.
Actually, she did something much worse - she stole all the tampons. Men don't know much about these things but even they suck the air through their teeth at this one. There are some things you just do not do.
But while Eve was at one end of the island drunk on paranoia and ketchup, the rest of the group was carving "cow" into her rainproof, before putting it back in her knapsack, to be discovered only when she got home. But when the chips were down, the Survivor islanders delved deep into hidden reserves to discover an unseemly loathing. The Big Brother housemates, however, could pull out only a common boredom.
It's really too early to review Treasure Island, seeing as the contestants only set foot on the sandy rock in the final minute of the first episode. The rest of the hour was spent undergoing a final test at Killary Harbour, which reduced 22 people to 16, while introducing the characters involved in the process. Well, perhaps labelling them is more accurate. "Padraic, 26, gay" read one caption, as if this was all we needed to know about him.
This made for predictable, if polished viewing, with easily recognisable personalities and possible tensions and relationships spelled out in large letters to help us along. The series has eight more programmes to drag all this out, though - and may rise or fall on the fact that the contestants won't be voting each other off but falling through a weekly challenge. That may rob the show of the one thing it'll need most if the ratings flag - let's call it The Tampon Factor. There may be a secret weapon though. There are a lot of sharks swimming around that island, the voiceover kept telling us. A lot of sharks.
Of course, all of this stuff is pointless, ephemeral rubbish. Very watchable, pointless, ephemeral rubbish, but rubbish all the same.
With it dominating the schedules, it's hard to believe that there is still some challenging, illuminating television squeezing into the breaks between reality game shows. But there is. BBC2 has been particularly strong this week. Its Table 12 series of individual ten-minute dramas, all set at the same table in a restaurant, has been especially enjoyable, proving that it doesn't take two hours or, as is increasingly the case, two nights of prime time to tell a decent story.
On the same channel at the start of the week, A Lump In My Throat saw a forceful performance by Neil Pearson of John Diamond's eloquent journal of his cancer. Diamond died earlier this year, but was heavily involved in this adaption of his newspaper columns for the Guardian. They do not make a natural source of drama, and the script often struggled to cope with the graft. Diamond would wander off into some flight of whimsy or witty observation that worked wonderfully in print but which looked only awkward and indulgent as a comedy sketch. In the monologues, though, the frustrations, indignities and absurdities of his illness were starkly delivered. It also, literally, gave voice to them. Having had most of his tongue removed, he could only talk with what he called his "honk", and you suspect that, given how much A Lump In My Throat concentrated on this, he gained great enjoyment from watching Pearson deliver his lines with such clarity, such potency.
How the Indonesian government still allows John Pilger into the country is anybody's guess. Pilger's outstanding, brave and often lonely investigation into the plight of East Timorese during the 1990s was journalism so important that it was arguably a factor in the eventual withdrawal of Indonesia from the region. He was back in the country this week, in The New Rulers of the World, this time to examine the effect of globalisation on the people there. He didn't have to go too far offside to do so, catching dengue fever in the filthy labour camps outside Jakarta.
This, though, was a single programme that should really have been a series. Pilger wanted to explain it all. The mechanics of the sweatshops, the Economic Processing Zones, the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation, the impact of debt on the Third World, the Suharto coup, the West's complicity in genocide, the United States Space Command, poverty in Britain, privatisation of public utilities . . . It was too much, too quickly. A whistlestop tour of the economic evils of the world: no time to dwell, must keep moving - there's another evil just around the corner.
What kept The New Rulers of the World together were the facts. One million people died in the coup that brought General Suharto to power in 1965. The US ambassador at the time said his country was "admiring" of what the army was doing. The British ambassador, in a phrase that would have made even P.G. Wodehouse blush, encouraged "a little shooting".
The CIA went a step further and presented Suharto with a list of 5,000 opponents he should eliminate. Nixon called Indonesia "the greatest prize" and the West wasn't slow in claiming it. Indonesia is now a country in which 70 million live in extreme poverty, with many of the brands on our backs being made by workers who earn 72p a day, work 16-hour shifts standing up and live in shanties fashioned from breeze blocks and packing cases. Check your wardrobe, check the labels.
There was nothing new in Pilger's report. In essence, he was merely adopting Naomi Klein's far more exhaustive thesis in No Logo and taking a camera to it. But it certainly needs repeating.
In the days leading up this year's May Day march in Trafalgar Square there was a conspiracy, said Pilger, between government and police to undermine the anti-globalisation campaigners. The marchers were made out to be thugs, masking a thirst for violence behind what Tony Blair called a "spurious cause". Pilger was right, but he failed to make one point.
The media was involved too, unquestioningly drumming up the possibility of rioting to such a degree that when things turned out to be relatively peaceful, correspondents were on the News reporting from a story that wasn't happening and looking dejected about it. Over-ambitious and ultimately confusing as The New Rulers of the World was, it at least reclaimed the facts.
tvreview@irish-times.ie
