Who’ll win, the Tigers or the Sharks? I literally don’t have a clue but I’ve just spent an hour wildly glued to the drama of Channel 4’s Shipwrecked, back for a rip roaring 100th series.
I’ve never really seen it before; I think I caught some of the first series years ago. Like all reality TV though, it’s been warped into some grotesque spectacle making the original incarnation look like a Victorian ankle showing in comparison. I remember watching a chap having to drown a chicken in the beautiful ocean; he didn’t resign as a recruitment consultant in Swindon for that. Still, I remember the look in his eye immediately after he did it. It was a fascinating mix of wild eyed masculine emancipation and loss of an innocence he didn’t know he had.
The producers of the show clearly felt the same semi-sexual voyeuristic thrill I felt and decided to take the show in that general direction. The new series therefore takes a finely profiled collection of narcissistic clothes horses and puts them on a beautiful apparently empty (aside from all those wires and production team members) desert island. They then fanny about doing things that they look like they’d struggle with anyway, like washing and feeding themselves which they all seem to have done for them in the real world.
Thus far we’ve been introduced to a selection of interesting folk, none of which you’d trust with anything important, you probably wouldn’t risk putting them in charge of a tin of beans. We’ve had a chap who described himself as being without sexuality, like some sort of giant, Liverpudlian flower. Although, when he says he has no sexuality he really means he’s gay, the panic that flashed across his eyes when he was asked the question was magic. Also, this one’s borderline brain dead, if it wasn’t for his hyper emotional reactions to fairly mundane, obvious things (“Oh my…GOD”) like new people visiting the island then you’d be forgiven for thinking you were watching a pickled foetus in the bowels of the Natural History Museum. Also, on hyper emotional reactions, selecting a leader isn’t the most devastating, emotionally complex and demanding issue, it’s easy, pick the one who has laces that they tied themselves. I’d love to expose this tribe to some real emotion. See how they cope when they find out that a serial killer has battered their family to death (“No...WAYYYYYYYY, wait a minute, I’ve got a text”).
There also seems to be a few posh people on, having not seen it much, I’m not sure if this is a theme. Lot’s of big house, polo playing arseholes who pronounce ‘really’ as ‘ra-AGH-herrrrrr-lay’ and it takes them literally about a week to knock a sentence out. They all see themselves instantly as the leader of the dirty proles. The thing is that they are equally clueless, but in a different, more aggressive way. Y’know, the sort of tone that got centuries of colonial expansion done, and managed to pay off the family of that girl who cried “rape” at Joshua’s polo party.
Anyway, it lit a flame in my chest watching this show and Introversial will be following the heartache, bitching, and incessant conversations about nothing over the next few weeks. I’m hoping that this group of people will be the ones who break reality television. We all know its coming, one day something will horribly wrong and television will have to rely on proper television shows again. Hopefully, this series will end with Mark (big hair, androgynous and a body like a toddler) running wild eyed into the ocean to embrace an icy death after having raped and killed Sonny (literally nothing behind the eyes, could potentially have shredded wheat for a brain).
I’ve never really seen it before; I think I caught some of the first series years ago. Like all reality TV though, it’s been warped into some grotesque spectacle making the original incarnation look like a Victorian ankle showing in comparison. I remember watching a chap having to drown a chicken in the beautiful ocean; he didn’t resign as a recruitment consultant in Swindon for that. Still, I remember the look in his eye immediately after he did it. It was a fascinating mix of wild eyed masculine emancipation and loss of an innocence he didn’t know he had.
The producers of the show clearly felt the same semi-sexual voyeuristic thrill I felt and decided to take the show in that general direction. The new series therefore takes a finely profiled collection of narcissistic clothes horses and puts them on a beautiful apparently empty (aside from all those wires and production team members) desert island. They then fanny about doing things that they look like they’d struggle with anyway, like washing and feeding themselves which they all seem to have done for them in the real world.
Thus far we’ve been introduced to a selection of interesting folk, none of which you’d trust with anything important, you probably wouldn’t risk putting them in charge of a tin of beans. We’ve had a chap who described himself as being without sexuality, like some sort of giant, Liverpudlian flower. Although, when he says he has no sexuality he really means he’s gay, the panic that flashed across his eyes when he was asked the question was magic. Also, this one’s borderline brain dead, if it wasn’t for his hyper emotional reactions to fairly mundane, obvious things (“Oh my…GOD”) like new people visiting the island then you’d be forgiven for thinking you were watching a pickled foetus in the bowels of the Natural History Museum. Also, on hyper emotional reactions, selecting a leader isn’t the most devastating, emotionally complex and demanding issue, it’s easy, pick the one who has laces that they tied themselves. I’d love to expose this tribe to some real emotion. See how they cope when they find out that a serial killer has battered their family to death (“No...WAYYYYYYYY, wait a minute, I’ve got a text”).
There also seems to be a few posh people on, having not seen it much, I’m not sure if this is a theme. Lot’s of big house, polo playing arseholes who pronounce ‘really’ as ‘ra-AGH-herrrrrr-lay’ and it takes them literally about a week to knock a sentence out. They all see themselves instantly as the leader of the dirty proles. The thing is that they are equally clueless, but in a different, more aggressive way. Y’know, the sort of tone that got centuries of colonial expansion done, and managed to pay off the family of that girl who cried “rape” at Joshua’s polo party.
Anyway, it lit a flame in my chest watching this show and Introversial will be following the heartache, bitching, and incessant conversations about nothing over the next few weeks. I’m hoping that this group of people will be the ones who break reality television. We all know its coming, one day something will horribly wrong and television will have to rely on proper television shows again. Hopefully, this series will end with Mark (big hair, androgynous and a body like a toddler) running wild eyed into the ocean to embrace an icy death after having raped and killed Sonny (literally nothing behind the eyes, could potentially have shredded wheat for a brain).
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