It was one of the original reality TV shows. So why does the new series of Castaway feel like a rubbish Big Brother rip-off?
I tuned in for the first episode all excited. At last - a reality show which didn't make you feel guilty while you watched it. After all, as BBC1 controller Peter Fincham pointed out, this wasn't any old reality show - this was reality with a purpose!
Except it turned out it wasn't. Things have changed since Castaway aired on BBC1 in 2000, when 36 people were left largely alone on a remote Scottish island to get on with things for an entire year. Fincham said the genre had "evolved" - he wasn't kidding.
Unlike the original Castaway, we now have a presenter popping up every five minutes making smart and occasionally not so smart gags, pointing out the "conflict" among the contestants for those viewers not smart enough to spot it first time round.
The first Castaway seemed like a genuine attempt to see how people could survive in a Hebridean wilderness, catching fish, managing livestock and growing their own vegetables. In the new series the biggest dilemma appears to be - where's the next bog roll coming from?
Even worse is presenter Danny Wallace - I quite like his books, honest - with his pointless votes among the contestants. Jason Ross, in case you missed it, was voted the laziest contestant and banished to spend seven days on his own. Stop interfering!
The really original thing BBC1 could have done would have been to leave the show entirely alone and repeat the original format from scratch. Except with better scheduling - you never knew when the original series was going to be on next, and the ratings suffered accordingly.
It's not even been on a week yet, but giving the show just one outing a week on BBC1 is a mistake. How many viewers are going to switch over to BBC3 for their daily update? Well, on Tuesday night it was 346,000.
And don't even get me started on Castaway Exposed, a copycat of Big Brother's Big Mouth, except with Richard Bacon instead of Russell Brand. No wonder one critic, the London Evening Standard's Pete Clark, described Castaway as "Big Brother by the seaside".
Friday's launch show started with 4.1 million viewers, at the "fair" end of fair-to-middling. By Sunday's update on BBC1, it had fallen to 2.9 million, which is downright poor. I was one of the 1.2 million who tuned out, preferring BBC2's Adam Curtis documentary series The Trap. Okay, you got me, I taped that, I was watching 24.
Anyway, did you stick with it? Tune out? And was the original much cop anyway? Or have I put on my rose-tinted specs? Perhaps, Celebrity Big Brother style, Ben Fogle and all his family will turn up in week six, force everyone else to act as their slaves and half the contestants will walk out. Maybe.
