How would you make a bridge? Right now. No warning. Make a bridge. This is what worries me, in either a bronze age time-travel scenario (unlikely) or a dystopian downfall of society-type deal (quite likely): how would I do anything practical at all? I can’t make a bridge. I can’t tend to wounds or harness electricity. I don’t know how batteries work or what plants are poisonous or not. When the world we’ve built collapses, and we rove the land in gangs with scrapped-together muscle cars, where will I fit in? “All right lads,” I’ll say to the de facto leaders who will emerge from the scorch, “does anyone need any typing doing? Hey: who of you wants Infinite Jest roughly explaining to you? I’m still figuring out the ending but I can get you most of the way there … ”
Anyway, to The Bridge (Sunday, 9pm, Channel 4), in which 12 people who don’t know how to make a bridge attempt to make a bridge. You are right in thinking this is one of the most Channel 4 shows ever committed to film, because it’s got the lot: wilderness-set reality format where someone is literally always being submerged in cold water; sped-up drone shots of a remote British lake; that particular Channel 4 breed of reality contestant: not the glossy fame-wanters of ITV, but rather the “here for a challenge” types who do a rugged TV show instead of just running a marathon; James McAvoy parachuted in to narrate. Over a series of hour-long episodes, filmed in the midst of Covid, we watch as a bunch of horny under-30s flirt over the boughs of crap rafts, while a solitary outlying 60-year-old sits down and fumes about it.
If I were to fault The Bridge – and I hated it, so I will – I’d say it was glaringly miscast. The majority of the 12 contestants are young, clueless and willing to have a go – and also in the throes of a fugue state of Covid arousal – meaning every moment they are not tying planks of wood together and wading into a lake in wellies, they are having tender little chats over steaming cups of tea and doing shy to-camera grins about it afterwards. Then you’ve got Sly, the elder statesman of the group, who actually knows how to build a bridge but refuses to because nobody has asked him nicely enough. I want to watch a dozen millennials try to make a bridge and fail: a sort of doomed televised Duke of Edinburgh award. Instead, I’m getting proto-Big Brother all-ages rowing, and people in cagoules storming to a portable toilet to weep.
But then the draw of reality television is that it is real people with real-life problems performing a fake task. It’s no different here, halfway across a rickety bridge to an island in the middle of a lake: the music slows, the pre-show interview sniffles into view, everyone tells us how their life went awry in a way that made them want to participate in a Channel 4 reality show. The group have faced adversity in various ways – a formerly homeless plumber, a mourning father, and, remarkably, a Covid survivor – and by the finale we’ll watch as this ensemble clambers towards a £100,000 prize and decides who gets to win it. If you make it that far, good for you. Personally I’m only here to learn enough bridge-building to keep me alive for more than a day once martial law gets announced.
