The fastest way to determine the quality of a factual entertainment show is to wait for the statistic. They all have them, crammed in early to legitimise whatever you’re about to see. “Britons consume over eight billion eggs a day,” they will state at the start of Yolk: the Prison Within. Or, for a documentary about insects, “Over the course of their lifetime, the average person accidentally swallows three buckets of spiders.” By and large, the more impressive the fact, the better the show.
Life Stripped Bare (Channel 4) had a truly stupid statistic. “One in three of us has enough unused stuff to fill an entire bedroom.” That’s what they used; pointless and meaningless and only marginally more useful than if they had just said: “Things exist.” In a way, though, it felt like a perfect fit. The statistic was stupid, and Life Stripped Bare was an hour of utter nonsense.
The show revolved around one simple question: could you survive without your possessions? And then a secondary question: could you survive without your possessions, even if we counted your clothes as possessions? And a tertiary question: how about if we filmed you surviving without your possessions, naked, with all your bits self-consciously flapping around in the wind? Oh, and while we’re here, how about we soundtrack all the footage of you blundering about in the nude with the sort of umpy-pumpy plinky-plonk music that wouldn’t sound out of place on a CBeebies show about a farting elephant who lives on the moon?
How you answer these questions probably depends on who you are. For example, I definitely couldn’t survive without my possessions, because I have a one-year-old child. Nappies count as possessions, and so do cleaning wipes, and had I appeared on this programme, it would have consisted of nothing but me crawling around in the nude, scraping pools of baby diarrhoea out of the carpet with my fingernails and crying a lot.
Similarly, an elderly participant would have struggled. Because, although subjects were allowed to retrieve one possession a day, they had to retrieve it from a locked storage container on the other side of town. This not only meant that they somehow had to drag sofas home by themselves but, on the first day at least, it meant that they had to get there naked.
Even though this sounds titillating, to the extent that it is probably why the show was even commissioned in the first place, it was incredibly hard to watch. As the nude participants pelted it for shelter while cars honked and strangers jeered, you were reminded of Cersei’s walk of shame from last year’s Game of Thrones. The lack of dignity was breathtaking.
But it didn’t matter, since nobody on Life Stripped Bare appeared to fully understand the concept of dignity anyway. There were six of them in total. But they were all identical – an obnoxious twentysomething fashion designer, two obnoxious twentysomething fashion photographers and three other obnoxious twentysomethings who all seemed to have fallen on hard times after coming joint last in a Nick Grimshaw lookalike competition – that it felt like at least five too many.
These berks giggled identically and whooped identically and picked identical possessions to retrieve. They were all young and thin and white. None of them had any real responsibilities or relationships to maintain. None of them had a good reason for taking part. Nobody found it difficult, or eye-opening, or anything other than a tiresome confirmation of how endlessly banteriffic they were. Everyone was simply doing it for the LOLs. The tedious, tedious LOLs.
Even the show itself seemed to understand how pointless the whole thing was, with the challenge petering out to nothing once everyone had got dressed. As soon as the subjects started retrieving luxuries such as PlayStations and wallets and cars, the narrative stalled, and listlessly spun its wheels until it was over.
By the end, everyone got to spout water-thin epiphanies about their experience. One of them realised they used their phone too much. Another realised that homeless people must have it quite bad. The fashion designer realised that she only wore half of her bikinis. She threw the remaining 16 away.
But the lessons that Life Stripped Bare offered the viewer were much more scant. It taught us that money is useful. It taught us that shoes have a purpose. And, of course, it taught us that we should all own a onesie, just in case we stupidly agree to appear on a Channel 4 filler documentary that people will only watch because they think it will have breasts in it. Important stuff.
