So, the worst programme of the year is here. Good to get it out of the way early, I suppose. It’s The Week We Went Wild (Channel 5) and it’s like having a bucket of crap – I was going to say dashed at your television screen, but it’s more like having someone carefully spread it on with a spatula, side to side, corner to corner, so that not a single pixel is missed.
The premise is as simple as it is stupid – send a troubled family on a five-day trek through the Panamanian jungle so that they can bond and mend themselves.
The inaugural family are the Reeds. Dawn has eight children by six fathers. The older ones resent being used as babysitters while she goes out on what they consider to be far too many dates with far too many unsuitable men resulting in far too many pregnancies. Dawn says she only goes out once a fortnight and is entitled to have a life. On top of this mass of chronic misery is the fact that six years ago, Dawn’s 16-year-old son Josh was killed in a car accident.
So, this genuinely suffering, broken, angry clan are turned out into the jungle, as ill-equipped to help themselves out of their hopeless dynamic as they are to cross crocodile-infested rivers, build shelters and search for potable water. They bawl helplessly at each other, mired in grief and tropical mud.
As reality television, it is insanely boring. It is just five days of walking through leafy terrain and a lot of unnecessary screaming at unfamiliar wildlife. Supposedly they go four days without food or water, but, oh, we are such super-sophisticated audiences now that we know this is highly unlikely to be true, not least because if it were, the Reeds would be a set of rotting carcasses by the third ad break and everything would be a lot quieter. There was no “emotional journey” by these bereaved, inarticulate people. In the final few minutes, Mark and Dawn briefly apologised to each other for the row they had had at the beginning and claimed, in the face of absolutely no evidence, that they had healed rifts and were going home happier, but the stink of utter bullshit was everywhere.
As a study of everything that is wrong with reality television, you couldn’t ask for more. It was lazy, corrupt, exploitative of damaged, vulnerable people and altogether shameful. Paragon Productions made it. Just so you know.
What, I find myself asking, would the ancient Orcadians have made of it all? This is mostly because we are now halfway through the three-part series Britain’s Ancient Capital: Secrets of Orkney (BBC2), which attests that the archipelago off the north coast of Scotland was the cultural capital of the neolithic world and the origin of the stone circle cult that culminated in Stonehenge. It sounds wildly implausible until a) you look at all the evidence patiently unearthed at the Ness of Brodgar in the last decade, and b) who’s moving into the White House on Friday. Clearly, anything is possible.
Neil Oliver – helped this time by naturalist Chris Packham, archaeological explorer Andy Torbet and engineer Shini Somara – delivered his customary densely packed hour, full of facts and treasures and a gentle insistence that you should think yourselves backwards into a landscape and mindset long since forgotten. Like the volunteers patiently brushing away the soil around 5,000-year-old bones, he gets us down to it in the end.
Answers are pursued. How much whalebone could the islanders expect to harvest in a given year, for their needles and their mattocks and their roof struts? Let’s go through the whale beaching archives and make our best guess. How did they transmit their ways and their culture to the mainland from which they were separated by the turbulent waters of the Pentland Firth and the treacherous depths of the Swelkie (Norse, I hope you wish to know, for “the Swallower”)? Let’s amass the skills and knowledge of assorted experts and build a cowhide and willow-framed boat, waterproof it with lard and set careful sail.
If it’s not your kind of thing, it’s not your kind of thing (I personally am torn between wanting to throw up my entire life and go and volunteer at the Ness dig and simply hoping that Ken Follett writes his next doorstopper about ancient Orkney and I can live it all from the comfort of my sofa), but the thoroughness, the detail, the love and care that is taken with these programmes seems an increasingly rare and precious thing. Also the basis for a very good survival manual, should we need it in the weeks and months and years to come.
