No-one seems to have written a review yet, so I'll start.
The premise of this series is that you take 20 people, supposedly representative of everyday UK society, give them a small amount of training, a load of fur and leather (and boots) to wear, some sticks and flints and a dead deer, and stick them in a couple of wooden huts in the depths of a Bulgarian forest and, as a social and anthropological experiment, see how they manage for two months while summer disappears and winter sets in.
I'll tell you the answer. Not very well, as you may expect. Right, that's got the anthropological experiment aspect out of the way, and I don't suppose it's any surprise whatsoever.
The viewing interest - and I confess that it is fascinating, in the same way that watching a car crash in slow motion is fascinating - lies not in seeing the ever-diminishing group of volunteers fail in almost every endeavour, because that is more or less a guarantee from the start, but in seeing the interaction between right-headedness and wrong-headedness, industry and indolence, well-intentioned team playing and extreme social ineptitude married with attempted alpha male domination.
I find myself thinking that this group was picked, not so much for their abilities or their representation of a cross section of present-day society, but rather - as in so much reality TV - for their ability to crash and burn on camera while striking the viewer as stupefying that they were ever picked to go in the first place. For every tribe member who tries to organise the large number of critically necessary jobs to be done to ensure that they don't starve to death, suffer attack by predatory animals, have perishable food go off etc. etc. and unending etc., (or who actually does those jobs), there is some pinhead who eats more than their fair share, or sits around the camp all day doing sod-all, or defecates in camp rather than go to the latrine area.
As I write this, the group is down to seven remaining members (of the initial 20, the first one left when she passed out mid-afternoon on the day they arrived, and subsequent attrition has been constant). Of the seven, I have some sympathy with two of them: a hard working woman, currently justifiably voicing a degree of bitterness at the way others have failed to support her, and a man who has worked himself into a physical and mental place from which he might not recover while the "experiment" continues: both have been committed team players since the start. There are still some irritants in the camp, although the main one - an obtuse non-team player and (I don't mean to be funny) self-appointed (and spectacularly unsuccessful) "hunter" - has departed after an allegation (disputed) of a sexual assault on a young female "tribe member" who seems to have been hugely undisturbed by it. The vegetarian volunteer is still in camp; fortunately the group's consistent failure to secure meat has served to make her look less dopey as a stone-ager than she is.
I can't wait to see how it turns out.
This is glorious car crash TV, and I recommend it.
The premise of this series is that you take 20 people, supposedly representative of everyday UK society, give them a small amount of training, a load of fur and leather (and boots) to wear, some sticks and flints and a dead deer, and stick them in a couple of wooden huts in the depths of a Bulgarian forest and, as a social and anthropological experiment, see how they manage for two months while summer disappears and winter sets in.
I'll tell you the answer. Not very well, as you may expect. Right, that's got the anthropological experiment aspect out of the way, and I don't suppose it's any surprise whatsoever.
The viewing interest - and I confess that it is fascinating, in the same way that watching a car crash in slow motion is fascinating - lies not in seeing the ever-diminishing group of volunteers fail in almost every endeavour, because that is more or less a guarantee from the start, but in seeing the interaction between right-headedness and wrong-headedness, industry and indolence, well-intentioned team playing and extreme social ineptitude married with attempted alpha male domination.
I find myself thinking that this group was picked, not so much for their abilities or their representation of a cross section of present-day society, but rather - as in so much reality TV - for their ability to crash and burn on camera while striking the viewer as stupefying that they were ever picked to go in the first place. For every tribe member who tries to organise the large number of critically necessary jobs to be done to ensure that they don't starve to death, suffer attack by predatory animals, have perishable food go off etc. etc. and unending etc., (or who actually does those jobs), there is some pinhead who eats more than their fair share, or sits around the camp all day doing sod-all, or defecates in camp rather than go to the latrine area.
As I write this, the group is down to seven remaining members (of the initial 20, the first one left when she passed out mid-afternoon on the day they arrived, and subsequent attrition has been constant). Of the seven, I have some sympathy with two of them: a hard working woman, currently justifiably voicing a degree of bitterness at the way others have failed to support her, and a man who has worked himself into a physical and mental place from which he might not recover while the "experiment" continues: both have been committed team players since the start. There are still some irritants in the camp, although the main one - an obtuse non-team player and (I don't mean to be funny) self-appointed (and spectacularly unsuccessful) "hunter" - has departed after an allegation (disputed) of a sexual assault on a young female "tribe member" who seems to have been hugely undisturbed by it. The vegetarian volunteer is still in camp; fortunately the group's consistent failure to secure meat has served to make her look less dopey as a stone-ager than she is.
I can't wait to see how it turns out.
This is glorious car crash TV, and I recommend it.
