“I couldn’t survive without my smartphone” being an utterable phrase is the most damning indication of how soon we’re going to be killed off by a race of sentient apps. They’d probably keep us as pets, using our synced step-count, dietary intake and sleep monitor to keep us in perfect condition. Come to think of it, an app would make an excellent overlord. Who am I to complain if I get turned into a breathing flesh Tamagotchi?
It would certainly make for a more relatable iteration of Survivor (Nine GO!): put some people on an island with nothing but a bag of rice and 72 Apple devices, harass them every three minutes with emails that could have waited, and troll them with 140-character finger turds. Whoever is left at the end who has not deliberately lodged an entire coconut in their oesophagus is the victor, and wins an entire week free from invitations to play Candy Crush Saga.
It’s the unrelatable aspect of Survivor that makes it moderately intriguing reality TV fare. Everyone’s tried their hand at karaoke (The Voice), done a bit of cooking (Masterchef), or dated 159 co-habiting women simultaneously before proposing to one of them after 38 minutes (can’t remember the name … Soon-to-be Ex-Factor?).
Not many of us, however, have attempted to spear fish in our underwear, or survive on rice while sleeping in a pile of twigs that offer less respite from the elements than a papier mache umbrella.
There’s obviously a production team looking after things: it would be over-committing to the show’s premise if Jeff Probst came out at the end of an episode and announced “So ... unfortunately, none of them made it. None of them survived. Next week on Survivor: footage of a fly banquet.”
Despite this behind-the-scenes help, there is still something primevally appealing about a show which demands its contestants can create fire. It’s definitely a step-up from Big Brother where no discernible skills are required beyond the ability to sit on a couch for buttock-callusing amounts of time before some senseless challenge: singing to a cake for 30 minutes without using the word “Stalin”, for example.
Contestants going all Bear Grylls doesn’t automatically make Survivor a good show, but it’s nice to think that, if released into a zombie apocalypse, they would be able to handle things (clearing out infested prisons and setting up new societies). Big Brother housemates would probably try to fend off swathes of the undead by performing a choreographed twerk.
Survivor’s intense production values are one element of the show that mildly irritates. It seems an episode can’t go two minutes without splicing in footage from a David Attenborough documentary. It makes for incongruous viewing: one moment you’re watching mud-caked athletes chatting about some bark they just found, the next you’re staring into the nostrils of an Iguana. The flame torches everywhere are a bit much too: they make the tribal councils feel like the precursor to a human sacrifice.
Another frustration is the formula, which hasn’t changed much since it was first presented by Jeff Probst’s great grandfather, four thousand years ago. This season’s contestants are straight out of the back catalogue: the usual mixture of gorgeous sporty young things, a designated bigot, and someone a bigot would love to hate. To evade eviction, or for a chance to win a vegetable, the challenges once again require the contestants to crawl through mud to solve a sudoku by throwing coconuts at it. Or something like that.
Yes, it’s all recycled guff that’s worlds away from real survival, but I guess that’s part of its appeal. Who wants to watch housemates trying to anatomically merge with their sofa? Isn’t that what we’re doing already?
