When Channel 4 launched a call last November for volunteers, there was some pretty big talk about Eden: it would have as much impact as the first series of Big Brother. It would play on an underlying sense, mainly from Paul Mason but from other people as well, that the current world order was a busted flush. “Eden will attempt to tap into the rejection of capitalist values,” the Independent reported at the time, “reflected in the surge of young supporters which helped Jeremy Corbyn seize the Labour leadership.”
Little did anybody know that, by the time the programme came to air, the end of civilisation would be a perfectly plausible eventuality and we’d all be trying to patch together a post-society toolkit of basil, Kalashnikovs and whatever skills we managed to attain in the days when we talked about peak oil. Has the world ever known such prescient programming?
Instead of a houseful of people chosen for their pecs and personality disorders, these 23 contestants (three of them are actually embedded crew, and it’s not, strictly speaking, a contest, unless it’s them against the world) were selected for what they know and what they can do. They will arrive on a remote peninsula in the Scottish highlands with only what they can carry, and build a society from scratch.
Professions and trades represented: a paramedic and two junior doctors (obviously the first thing to learn as a society is how to defend yourself collectively against the erosion of your workplace rights. Just kidding! I know junior doctors do other stuff as well); a shopfitter, a rowing coach, a dog-groomer-cum-shepherdess (I mean, look, I didn’t apply, so this isn’t sour grapes, but I do want to know how you get to describe yourself as a shepherdess – is there a guild? Is it like being a naturopath, and you simply anoint yourself? Do you have to get endorsed by a sheep?); an IT consultant-cum-gamekeeper (ditto, gamekeeper … is it just keeping stuff in cages? I can do that. I have guinea pigs); a personal-trainer-cum-yoga-instructor (these are the same job, done at different speeds); an ex-army officer (because the one thing there’s never enough of, when you’re building a life from scratch in extreme conditions among strangers, is people shouting); a shop assistant; a marine conservationist-slash-artist; a locksmith-slash-fisherman; a food development officer; a carpenter; a student, a vet, a life coach and an outdoor instructor. That’s right, I have lost my appetite for sarcastic descriptions of other people’s careers. It felt like shaky ground.
This is not the first time the channel has made a show called Eden, though it is surely the broadcaster’s first for inventing a high concept reality format quite different from a previous flop but giving it the same name. No matter. In 2002, they sent a bunch of people under 30 to live in the Australian outback. There were other differences to the format – new people were added to the community, who could be voted in by viewers, and might be exes or enemies of existing contestants – but the main difference was that it was completely vacuous. It bombed; it left its mark on the world – I’m a Celebrity owes it something, although arguably “there are scary insects in Australia” is not exactly a copyright-able discovery – but it bombed.
Whether or not every era gets the reality show it deserves is a moot point – can any decade be said to truly deserve Big Brother? – but you can certainly trace the preoccupations of the time through the citizens it heaps its ambitions upon. The 90s, after a brief flirtation with “normal” people – in the first series of Big Brother – hitched its wagon to the applecart of the attention-seeker, the big personality, the one who would overshare, emote, blow a gale of words and feelings and, critically, do all these things naked. Subtlety, complexity, depth, nuance – these were all just fancy ways to say “BORING”. Yet it transpired pretty fast that there was nothing more boring than people who amplify everything they’re feeling and immediately say it, and it quickly ceded to the age of the reality-celebrity, the judge-celebrity, the dancing-celebrity, the desperate noughties.
The nation’s first reality TV experiment, entitled rather prosaically Living in the Past, saw six couples and three children recreate the Iron Age by wandering around naked, in a replica Iron Age settlement, harassing goats for milk. It is extraordinary to watch it now, not only because all the men look like Jeremy Corbyn and all the women look like Angela Eagle. It also caught, whole, like the miraculous capture of a dandelion in flight, that anxiety of the 70s: that there was something dishonest in the luxury of modern life, a fear of everything from the central heating to the abstracted, post-industrial workplace, where nobody physically made anything, and nobody got home from work needing a wash.
In interviews conducted with participants 30 years on, they were all plainly besotted with the idea of physical hardship, the kind of men and women it would turn them into. It was an era with a peculiarly British version of American off-grid culture; what people distrusted was not the government, exactly, not corporations (not yet), but themselves, and what that self was, separate from toil.
Eden spells out our anxieties a little more plainly: what if all these cogs of life, the commuting and the bureaucracy and Oliver Bonas and the internet and Nigel Farage and videos of cats, what if they’re all winding down? If you had to build it all again, what would you build? What are you going to need most, between a shepherdess and a dog groomer (in the unlucky event that the same person can’t do both)? Shit just got real, this new reality format is saying. Hopefully we’ll look back in 30 years and laugh. Fingers crossed.
