Eden began this week. It’s a clever title for a reality programme about a new life, with its inbuilt hint that all may not be as perfect as it first appears. A group of people are sent into the wilderness with only the very basics required to create a working community, and left there for a year, forgoing any contact with friends or family. These strangers are reliant only on each other, and the food they can find, kill and grow in the 600 acres of Ardnamurchan, a wild, windy, peninsula in the West Highlands. Already, episode one has sowed the seeds of controversy as a pig was rather brutally killed and one angry participant stomped off into the woods because he “didn’t feel like talking about things”.
But whether or not those who volunteered for Channel 4’s experiment have fun, or get along, isn’t the point. The real purpose of Eden is to give the rest of us, settled on our couches like the Moffatts in Gogglebox, the visceral thrill of escaping.
When the BBC’s Castaway pioneered the genre in 2000, it was the personal relationships that enthralled us, and the gentle struggle to build workable huts as then-unknown Ben Fogle strode about being likeably posh, and people in rainbow beanie hats moaned about the weather.
Now, most of us couldn’t care less about the cast of characters the producers have assembled: they’re the usual identikit reality TV bunch of super-fit ex-army types, expositional doctors and concerned yoga instructors. Seen one episode of The Island with Bear Grylls, you’ve seen ’em all and watched ’em argue about the best way to trap a seagull.
This time round, it’s the idea that delights us. After the past few months, we aren’t switching on for the schadenfreude of other people being cold, damp and miserable – we’re watching it as we used to watch Sex and the City – as a portal into a world we wish was ours. We no longer want walk-in shoe wardrobes and 80 pairs of Louboutins (in fact, looking back, it’s slightly embarrassing that we ever did. If the pinnacle of achievement is a full centipede’s worth of crippling footwear, something has gone wrong). No longer do we think, “But I couldn’t live without the news, or seeing my friends!”; we think, “God, imagine the joy of living without the news.” And post-Brexit, friendships that once seemed so unassailable, so far above the petty eddies of politics, have been sorely tested – some to breaking point, where the idea of simply moving far away from crowing, Brexiteer relations and politically aggressive friends and beginning again seems a Shangri-La.
A single scroll through Twitter now unleashes an overwhelming tide of human misery. Dissent, despair, axe attacks, shootings, the horror of Nice, the political wrangling … just the facts are bad enough, but our current consumption of information is like the Very Hungry Caterpillar on a crazed doughnut binge. Knowing what’s happened is no longer enough – we require opinions to be formed within seconds of the event itself, and just one or two won’t do: every day, we are caught in a riptide of think-pieces, angry tweets, arguments, meta-tweets directing us to other tweeted arguments that weren’t even on our timelines, videos from news outlets, videos from someone’s smartphone where “you can just see the shooter appearing in the top corner”. Our brains are not equipped to edit this deluge, but we’re compelled to keep swimming through it, due to a queasy combination of Fomo and guilt. There’s a vague, collective idea that bearing witness is somehow vital to our engagement in the human race – and that if we choose to absent ourselves, we may as well admit we don’t care about anyone but ourselves.
When the Paris shootings happened, it seemed essential to show solidarity with Facebook flags; since then, to maintain the idea of solidarity would be to switch to a new flag, candle or grief-meme every day. Some still try, but most have simply given up, hoping it will be assumed that they care.
No wonder we dream of a world far from rolling news streams, where the approach of Brexit will make less impact than the trembling glass of water in Jurassic Park. A place where we can start again, and try not to balls it up so badly, where our biggest concerns are not the internecine grappling of the Labour party or the hellish conundrum of how to combat terrorism, but where to gather rain-water and what to harvest for dinner.
Eden may already contain its snakes and mistakes – but we’ll watch it avidly, this time feeling not pity for the participants but a very biblical envy.
