Eden: Paradise Lost
Channel 4
★★★☆☆
Make or Break?
Channel 5
★☆☆☆☆
Finally we have an answer to the mystery of the missing TV show. Whatever happened to Eden, the year-long Castaway-style parable that vanished from TV last August after a single week? It turns out the 23 participants, cut off in remote Scotland, didn’t start deifying a pig’s head on a stick, or ritualistically hunting each other down while daubed in woad, more’s the pity, but things did get pretty hairy.
What else would you want? For all its lofty aims, Eden was always going to work best as reality TV, the genre that exists pretty much solely for the purpose of base-level schadenfreude. So here’s societal disintegration over five nights, folks, and it’s certainly a grade darker than just The Island with Bear Grylls with more drizzle and midges.
The participants did stage a (much-reported) walkout last summer, they did fall out to the point of punch-ups and they did start to starve. Indeed, hunger was a prevailing problem; you could almost feel each participant’s famished pangs while you watched them scrape the communal porridge pot.
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Hunger caused fractiousness, yet the breakdown seemed as much to do with humans’ capacity for being horrible. The know-it-all behaviour of the show’s lone-gun pillock, Anton (“a community has to have a bad guy to bring the rest together,” he self-rationalised, before crying and wringing his hands about being the bad guy), caused as many problems as the group’s failure to catch mackerel. The way the savage bitching turned on a sixpence towards Glenn the deer-hunter when he failed to supply venison was startling.
Altogether more fascinating than this unlikeability was when the feral threat turned into a full-scale rebellion against the programme itself. Briefly, we had the most meta reality show ever as the group walked out of Eden en masse in a protest about quitter Glenn’s decision to return to the camp, some fifth wall of television starting to crack as a producer entered the shot looking nonplussed. Couldn’t we have had more of this mad, chaotic situation? The editors have industriously condensed months of footage and I didn’t feel we were seeing the full picture.
Scapegoating, fighting and, coming tonight, heinous chauvinism . . . this oddly, grimly compelling allegory chills the cockles about the caveman anarchy awaiting society if mod-cons are stripped away. The premise implicit in the Eden title spoke to utopian hippy-ish ideals; now the whole thing feels like an edition of the dystopian horror show Black Mirror.
It’s nothing, however, compared with Channel 5’s reality-tropicana show, Make or Break?, a Love Island knock-off that’s just as dumb so will probably become the new cultural touchstone for the tabloids and intellectual commentariat to coo over. Buff, tattooed morons calling each other “babe” are prodded into cheating with their fellow bodacious beach bods, the noble premise being that it will help them to discover whether the grass really is greener. Sex workshops encourage the girls to let their “vaginas blossom”.
Sure, it’s knowingly trashy, youthful telly (baiting emotionally fragile couples as entertainment is just a bit of fun, after all), but between this and Eden you start to believe — truly believe — that civilisation is doomed.
james.jackson@thetimes.co.uk