“We’ve got to take the bum out and tie a knot in it.” Fencing contractor Paul is hunched over the carcass of a dead deer. “Take it out, pull it off and tie a knot in the end of it,” he confirms, sagely, and so begins the two hours of cold sweats and dry retching that is 10,000 BC.
The premise of the show is as follows: 20 volunteers are dumped in the wilderness, liberated from all the tools and comforts of modern life, then filmed tripping towards breaking point as they forage for food, make fire and build a functioning society, all helped by a hasty bit of survival training from archaeologist and former Navy Seal Klint Janulis. It is, essentially, a prehistoric rehash of Bear Grylls’s The Island, which was on Channel 4 last year. Unlike that series, though, whose original title was The Island Of Lost Blokes, 10,000 BC also includes female humans. This, IMO, is a welcome difference. Stop me if I’m wrong but I’ve got a pretty strong suspicion that women were present – some might even say vital – on the evolutionary journey that led us to this point. Would a camera crew have been able to follow a cross-section of Brits wandering round a forest in circles, scrabbling for worms and gormlessly asking “Why am I holding this stick again?” were it not for the involvement of women. Don’t mention it guys, it’s nothing.
For the cast, an odd mix of ancient history hobbyists, people with a mystifyingly tolerant attitude to camping, and the poor souls who saw the ad for a C5 reality show and pictured something sexier and easier (“When they said 10,000 BC I thought they were exaggerating a bit”), a few problems quickly arise. The first is that precisely none of the ensemble possess the specialised skills it took stone age man his entire life to acquire. The second is that half these jokers seem so witless it’s a wonder they don’t stumble into disaster at every turn in their modern lives, never mind their prehistoric ones. Take, for example, the laissez-faire attitude to mesolithic food hygiene. Four days into their two-month ordeal, the entrails of the deer the group have been provided with don’t look too pretty. The putrefying lungs, hearts and liver the group has casually draped over trees like some sort of satanic butcher’s window are indistinguishable under a crawling mass of larvae-laying flies. There are maggots in the mucoid Hoover tube I’m told is the oesophagus, which they were apparently saving for a special occasion. The deerskins used as bedding and jaunty little shawls have maggots in them. One of the group finds a large clump of what looks revoltingly like chip shop bluebottle roe in the slimy chest cavity of the deer. “I can’t tell what’s mud and what’s rotten skin,” someone says, appetisingly.
Primitive Flint God only knows what the participants hope to achieve from this, but there’s no denying the call to the wild is strong, even in 2k15. Each of the 20 volunteers has their own special reason for wanting to live like this for eight weeks. None get quite as far as saying, “Looking through the reflection of a screen into my own dead eyes all day has birthed a desire to reconnect to the corporeal body in a way that only mild dysentery, washing in puddles and a close working relationship with deer anuses can re-forge,” but Kym comes closest. Kym, who’s way too sweet to have been dealt the poor hand in life that she has, wants to strip away the calloused layers her life has built up, get back down to the “natural her”. Bless her. I don’t know whether, 12,000 years ago, people wondered what life would be like if things were different, but if stone age man is really so similar to us it seems likely. So maybe Great-Grandma Ug and the rest of her clan would attempt to gee up Kym by grunting the mesolithic equivalent of the motivational phrase that you don’t get diamonds without pressure (if their knowledge of geothermal principles was up to it). Or maybe they’d just give the camp a very old-fashioned look, slap them into shape and tell them to stop being such mucky little beggars.
10,000 BC starts on Monday, 10pm, Channel 5
