A fresh batch of maroonees is dropped off on a tropical paradise/purgatory. Sort-of famous ones this time – the usual former boyband members, comedians, stars of scripted reality etc, straight from central castaways. Celebrity Island with Bear Grylls (Channel 4, Sunday) it’s called. They’re given a bit of water, some basic tools, a few motivational words from Bear. “Worthwhile things in life don’t come easy,” he tells them. “Embrace our hardships every day. Positivity, positivity, positivity.” Thanks Bear, I’ll be taking that one to work with me every day. Positivity, positivity, positivity.
“Is there an alpha male waiting, screaming to come out of me?” asks Ollie Locke from Made in Chelsea. “Well, there actually has been at some point, yes,” he adds, bashfully. Chelsea Olly is good value. “We have no food, we have no Deliveroo, we have nothing,” he says, looking a hermit crab, potentially supper, in the eye. They – hermit crabs – will crawl into any opening, apparently. “Like arseholes?” asks Towie’s Lydia Bright, classily. (Essex Lydia is good value, too.)
The star of this opening (careful, watch out for hermit crabs) episode is a man famous for shouting into a big phone. Dom Joly reluctantly agrees to be leader for a day. He names the island (Pissflapia), commissions a rousing national anthem from Aston Merrygold (ex-JLS), appoints a health minister (Embarrassing Bodies’ Dr Dawn Harper) and a fashion minister (Ollie).
By the following morning, the reluctance and “for a day” parts of Joly’s leadership seem to have been entirelyforgotten, along with democracy. Megalomania has taken its hold. “I was expelled from school, and look at this. Fuck you, Haileybury, running my own country now,” he shouts, menacingly. He now demands deference at all times, plus sexual favours from his subjects. He’s calling himself president, but it looks like dictatorship to me. Papa Dom. And it’s very amusing – put that man on all shows like this.
You can’t live entirely off power though. He sends out a party – including Olly and Lydia – to look for water. They fail miserably, get lost and thirsty, and end up pressing the emergency SOS button; Bear’s safety team comes to rescue them less than 24 hours into the adventure. It’s all too much for Olly, who really wanted to prove “that I’m not a complete idiot and I’m actually quite good at stuff and not this stupid kind of pink-wearing guy that I think a lot of people think I am”. Not much change then, in the thinking. Never mind, though, there’s always tomorrow.
So the following day, Olly and Lydia are sent out to find water again. “If someone gave me a bag of, like, brand new makeup right now, I’d say: ‘No thank you, I’d rather have a bottle of water,’” says Lydia. That’s how serious it’s got. Again they fail miserably, get lost, and thirsty, end up pressing the emergency SOS button, and the safety team comes to rescue them, less than 48 hours into the adventure. And then point them to the spring, and the nice beach with en-suite pooing beach. Well, otherwise they would have perished, and that would be a shame.
I’m thoroughly enjoying this. But I’m looking for more input from the others next week – such as Labour selfie queen Karen Danczuk and rugby hunk Thom Evans, for example. Someone needs to start a revolution, topple you-know-who before he gets out of control. I’m sure the CIA would help. There are bays all over the place: they could turn one into Guantánamo, cage him in the sun. There’s got to be a root somewhere round here that works as a natural orange dye.
All of which seems trivial next to the documentary The White Helmets (on Netflix now). This is real suffering, in Syria, right now. It’s directed by London-based Orlando von Einsiedel, but filmed mostly by its subjects, the Syrian Civil Defense, who risk (and frequently lose) their lives by rushing to bomb sites to try to rescue people. So the viewer is taken right into a place that was a name on the news and a distant barrel-bomb plume, but is suddenly a visceral hellhole of deafening detonation, destruction, dust and death.
With just a few tiny pockets of hope, lest you give up completely on humanity. Like the White Helmets’ work itself, selfless and brave. And Mahmoud the miracle baby, pulled from the rubble, alive. Netflix, with its global reach, is a good place for this one. Everyone should see it. You, Putin, America and its allies. Oh, and Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson. This, sir, is Aleppo.
