A year from now, once we’ve come to know the participants and grown to understand the format, Channel 4’s new reality show Eden will be much easier to pigeonhole. Based purely on the first episode, it’s most easily summed up as Big Brother with cagoules. It’s Love Island with trench foot. It’s I’m a Bearded Ninny, Get Me Out of Here.
Eden bills itself as a totally unmediated reality show. There are 23 strangers who have given up everything to live on a remote, fenced-off private estate in the Scottish Highlands for a year with minimal supplies. Their movement is captured on cameras and by the four crew members who live among them. There’s no meddling from producers, no evil mind games designed to drive them apart. Just lots of footage of some well-meaning people attempting to build a community.
In theory, it’s a terrific idea. By quietly letting them get on with it, Eden can claim to be a true social experiment. There’ll be no weekly evictions here, and no winner to crown when the year is up. The show will end, and everyone will just go home. The best anyone can hope for is that Channel 4 gets a new Ben Fogle figure at the end, which doesn’t seem like the greatest prize in the world, but still.
However, in practise, Eden’s first episode came off as flat and dreary. (To be fair, this is a charge you can level at the first episode of every reality show ever made.) There are too many people, and you can’t tell them apart, and they’re all too busy being polite to do anything of interest. There were no real stand-out moments, because nobody is comfortable enough to be themselves yet.
Well, almost nobody. Eden’s stand-out character is already a guy named Anton. Anton isn’t like anyone else on the show. Anton isn’t like anyone at all, really, with the possible exception of Christopher Eccleston’s character in the last third of Shallow Grave. As soon as the group had set up camp, Anton decided they would be better off elsewhere and immediately started building a shelter of his own miles from everyone else, in an area of the grounds already earmarked for hunting.
Anton was presented as a classic reality-show baddie. He’s compulsively unable to compromise. He’s quick to anger. He insists on addressing the viewer with long confessional monologues. He has already threatened to leave. Anton is trouble, because Anton doesn’t want to be part of the group. However, given that the group contains a) a woman who self-identifies as a forager and b) a man who owns a set of bongos, you can see Anton’s point. I like Anton, and it will be a shame when he stabs everyone in their sleep three months from now.
But Anton is the sole source of fun here. If Eden reminds me of anything at the moment, it’s the first series of Big Brother. Everyone is too reasonable to be entertaining. There are endless meetings about nothing. As yet, the characters aren’t distinct enough to hold the show together. It looks as if it’s more fun to be a part of than to actually watch. Over and over again last night, I found myself wishing for a Makosi, or a Nikki Grahame, or a Brian Belo; a wildcard who could stir the subjects out of the torpor they have already found themselves in.
However, this is just the first step in a year-long experiment. You get the sense that Eden will succeed in the longterm by letting the contestants get into trouble unaided. Sure, its beginning was a little muted, but by Christmas, when Anton has smeared himself in pig blood and declared himself the all-powerful godhead of a brutal personality cult, I’ll be glued to my screen.
