MY DAD’S favourite belief — aside from the notion that Live Aid would have been better if he’d played at it, which, given that he does most of his music on a small Casio keyboard, naked but for my mother’s pink dressing gown, he could well be right — is that, if push came to shove, he could “live in a hedge on a handful of rice” for a week.
Frankly, I think he merely voices most people’s assessment of their innate survival skills. None of us, after all, is keen to stand up and say: “I am a flabby, pale grub that needs the twofold exoskeleton of technology and suburbia to survive. Without them I’d be dead on Day One.”
Over the years, we have seen enough Ray Mears and reruns of Return to the Blue Lagoon to fancy our chances, if things got rough, of knocking up a skewer of rats. Indeed, we don’t merely reckon we could survive — we actually rather wish we had to. Actual acts of survival — not putting our head in a fire, eating lunch, remembering to take an umbrella if it’s rainy — take up little more than, say, 20 minutes of our day. If all you had to do were survive — no job, no Emmerdale, no pulling pieces of sweetcorn out of the dishwasher rotor-arm with a pin — then life would be fairly leisurely. It’s culture, civilisation and society that take up all our time, and we secretly wonder if we might be better off without them. Isn’t that, after all, the main selling point of going to live in the country? To find out what a life stripped of culture, civilisation and society would be like? I can’t see any other reason to live in a village just outside Colchester.
Of course, long-term survival projects make quite dull television. In a nutshell, the subjects get browner, thinner and meaner; it’s rather like those documentaries that follow a boy band for a year, I suppose.
The TV survival project of choice, therefore, is the adventure. Up a mountain, round an island, into a forest, down a well — if someone’s going to live a massively inconvenienced life for a while, there’s always a crew willing to follow them for an hour on Channel 4.
Advertisement
Take Pam Teale, 50, from Bradford. She has always wanted to live in a jungle. “Dreaming about it has got me through the bad times,” she explains, cooking chips in a badly lit kitchen.
For reasons that are never really explained — possibly because it’s simply that Pam got a phone call from Channel 4 saying: “We’d like to make that amusing jungle programme about you now, please” — Pam wakes up one day and decides that today is Jungle Day.
What’s more, she will be taking her brother, Peter, with her, too — possibly because Channel 4 said: “It would be quite funny if you took your brother with you as well, now we come to think of it.”
In Going to Extremes (Thursday, 8pm, C4) we learn that Peter used to be in the RAF, he explains while cleaning his kitchen, “before spending 20 years in office management”.
“Consequentially, I have an innate sense of order and organisation,” he adds, as we get a close-up of him sponge-scouring behind his mixer-tap. The subtext here is: there are no sponge-scourers in the jungle.
Advertisement
“I’m a bit dizzier than Peter,” Pam admits. We didn’t see her suitcase, but she had the air of someone about to set off to Peru with a carrier-bag full of Monster Munch, 20 Bensons, two pairs of knickers and a copy of TV Quick.
As I’m sure you can imagine, both Peter and Pam turn out to have an absolutely terrible time in the jungle. Despite managing to find an Amazonian tribe whose leader is called “Dave”, every other part of jungle living is an immense culture shock. The mosquitoes bite them, the river doesn’t wash Peter’s T-shirts clean enough, the holy hallucinogenic brew is roundly rebuffed (“It will make the trees jump!” “ No, thanks.”), and the natives hug them too hard (“She’s squeezing me very tight!”).
And they really don’t like the chow.
“I didn’t think everyone would be eating maggots,” Pam wails, after rejecting her third maggot-based meal in a row. “I thought some of them might eat something else. Like at home, when Pete doesn’t like Parmesan cheese.”
Still, Peter and Pam do learn a great wisdom from their time in the forest — that they are flabby, pale grubs that need the twofold exoskeleton of technology and suburbia to survive. In this respect, they are now wiser than most of us. They at least will never kid themselves that a plane crash high in the Andes could be the start of an excitingly simple life.
Advertisement
When Peter and Pam evacuate the Village of Dave, two weeks early, the People of Dave give Pam a hand-knitted bag.
“It’s making me itch,” she sighs, ungratefully, heading towards her Jeep.
The week’s two other TV adventures dealt in similarly useful illustrations of how poorly the average Englishman copes with 99 per cent of the Earth’s terrain. On Atlantic Britain (Saturday, C4, 7pm), Adam Nicholson has mortgaged his house to purchase the Auk, a 42ft yacht in which he intends to travel up the Atlantic seaboard of Britain. The fact that he has never sailed before seems admirably by-the-by — although notably less so on his first night onboard, when a storm hits the boat. All we get is a pitch-dark boat, a screaming wind, and the occasional, posh exclamation of “Ooof!” and “Argk!”, and “What the hell is that?” It’s a bit like listening to Hugh Grant trying to feel his way through a booby-trapped bran-tub of sirens.
Truth be told, Atlantic Britain is shaping up to be a bit of a treat. In the first episode, Adam meets an abseiler with a compulsion to just “let go and fly”, a man obsessed with the Lundy cabbage (“It’s the British Galapagos tortoise”), and a lifeboat man who once rescued someone sailing across the Channel to Barcelona, equipped only with an AA Roadmap of Britain.
The loons love the Atlantic side of Britain. They’re attracted by the sunsets. Force of Nature: The Southern Ocean (Saturday, C4, 7.30pm) meanwhile, is a stout reminder that some adventures are tougher than others. The Vendée Globe Yacht race takes place in the Southern Ocean, a place so inhospitable that, when the competitors regularly capsize, there aren’t even any sharks or whales around to eat them.
Advertisement
When Raphael Dinelli’s boat capsized in a storm, the only person who could rescue him was fellow competitor Peter Voss, who was 160 miles ahead of him in the race. Goss turned his yacht into a wind so strong “every minute was like being in a car crash”, and his generator was immediately ripped off.
He strapped himself to a cupboard below deck, performed an emergency, unanaesthetized operation on his own broken elbow, and then sailed for 48 hours in a hurricane until he found Dinelli half-dead in a lifeboat. Dinelli’s first action was to thrust a bottle of champagne into Goss’s hands.
“I thought, ‘typical Frenchman’,” Goss said laconically, before presumably going off to survive in a hedge for a week on a handful of rice.
FOWLER PLAY
Advertisement
NEWS that Vicky Fowler (played by Scarlett Johnson, above) is to leave EastEnders raises the exciting prospect of her method of dispatch. Most female characters either get knocked up inside the Queen Vic, or get knocked down outside it. No guns in hidden daffodils for them. But as the daughter of the late Dirty Den — recently brought back to the soap after being fairly conclusively dead — maybe it will be discovered that Vicky was never actually born in the first place.
FACE THE MUSIC
THE coverage of the Olympics on the BBC has been exemplary — but then I suppose it is quite difficult to screw up televising thousands of buff people mucking around in their underwear. I have one niggle, though — has something happened to Sue Barker’s face? Or is it one of those silly microphones on the side of her head? Every time I see her, I just keep wondering when she is going to start singing Vogue or Material Girl.