KEY POINTS:
If you stand on the hill at Harataonga Bay and look out to the empty beach, it's easy to feel like the last person on Earth. This is somewhat of a relief. Much has been made of the suggestion that Castaway - the BBC reality series that purports to remove 13 Britons from everyday life and force them to survive in a remote setting - is filmed in anything but a remote location.
The first clue that this is nonsense comes 15 minutes into our flight to Great Barrier Island. Our eight-seater biscuit tin of a plane must turn back because of poor weather. A day later, torrential rain floods the Castaway campsite, the main road is blocked and the castaways must cope with the miserable notion that this idyllic New Zealand spot has turned to mud.
Our second attempt, two weeks later, is more successful, despite the bumpy landing. To get from the airport to the site, we take a 40-minute drive, past a Thai restaurant, then into bushy oblivion. The rugged road snakes dangerously up cliffs and occasionally merges into a single lane. It's a harrowing drive. You'd have to be a mad triathlete to reach the restaurant by foot.
From up on the hill, where host Danny Wallace is doing a piece-to-camera about a castaway's freshly hacked hair, you don't see much of the castaways - just a couple of silhouettes jogging along the sand. There's also a peek of the three simple huts that are their homes.
But turn around and you get another view. Hidden in the valley is a vast camouflage-coloured tent. Inside is a labyrinth of TV studios run by 150 crew, hundreds of laptops and rooms that look like the interior of the USS Enterprise.
Next door, as a chef prepares a gourmet menu the likes of which the castaways will never see - today it's roast pork, ratatouille, and cake for dessert - professional eavesdroppers sit in a dark studio and listen in to the castaways' every word, 24 hours a day, waiting for a story to emerge. It feels a bit like The Truman Show meets Big Brother.
"It's more like a documentary series," says the show's creator and producer, Jeremy Mills. "It is a fine line, but we hired a doco crew who were skilled in crafting stories. It's more intelligent. And as for the castaways, they're up for a physical challenge. These are real life skills, not silly games."
It is seven years since the first series of Castaway became a TV hit in Britain. The purpose of the show is still the same, even if the mechanics have changed slightly. The idea is to remove people from their ordinary lives, drop them in a remote setting and see what happens, be it romance, self-discovery or conflict. But unlike the first series, which was set in Scotland and filmed over a year, these castaways are here for just three months.
That's partly because Castaway is no longer ground-breaking television. The appetite for reality shows has waned in the past seven years as the market has become saturated, and a year-long programme would not be sustainable. Plus, says Mills, all the good stuff in the original series happened in the first quarter.
Although Castaway was a pioneering force of worthy reality TV, it paved the way for the prurient (Big Brother), the contrived (Survivor) and other variations on the theme that seemed to serve no purpose other than inflating the contestants' already monstrous egos.
But Mills views Castaway as a valid social and psychological experiment. It just happens to have a lot of girls in bikinis. "It's fascinating to get this on tap," he says.
"They virtually forget there are camera crews after a while. You are really seeing the real people, the essence of these people." He is also adamant the castaways were not "stunt cast" to find extreme personalities, even if you'd be wary after watching the first, surprisingly funny, episode.
Among the group is an outspoken young Tory with more gusto than the Great Barrier wind, a pudgy fiction writer who "came here to show the world that fat doesn't necessarily mean lazy", an ex-Marine who speaks as though he's still in the corps, a former heroin addict, a lap dancer, a young toff who calls himself "the most heterosexual man in the UK", and a microbiologist who loves pointing out that she's a microbiologist.
All demonstrate what happens when a cross-section of society - albeit one that doesn't mind attention - tries to live together.
But the biggest star is immediately obvious. Bearded Scotsman Jonathan Shearer is a 42-year-old misfit who doesn't appear to like anyone. During an argument, a fellow castaway tries to douse the fire by pointing out that no one likes conflict. "I like conflict," he replies. "Why can't I get what I want?"
What follows is a callous pack mentality theme that continues throughout the series. And a lot of entertaining one-liners from Shearer's mouth.
"At first they all got along well. It was a bit annoying for us," says Mills. "But as we went on I was surprised at how vitriolic and lacking in compassion they could be."
Another surprise to have emerged is the humour. As Big Al removes a rat by the tail from his sleeping quarters, a fellow castaway quips, "Is that what normally happens to live things that crawl into your bed?" Gym-bunny Hassan has taken to calling himself "the Hassasinator".
The only person with direct contact with the castaways is the disarming, yet rather strange, host Wallace, who once started his own cult and claims to have founded an independent state called "Lovely".
"I've become obsessed with their lives," he says. "I'm fascinated and appalled. It's intriguing watching these people learning stuff and working out what's important in life."
It appears British viewers are intrigued too, despite a shaky start to the series. The first episode attracted 4.1 million viewers, but that nearly halved by the second week, in what was believed to be one of the lowest ratings for a BBC1 Sunday night primetime series.
But viewers returned when the show was moved to three half-hour slots throughout the week. New Zealand will get the one-hour show, essentially all the juicy bits cut together from the past week. In Britain, it screened on two networks: BBC1, and a reality-style version called The Last 24 Hours on BBC3, its younger-focused sister channel.
Britain also screened Castaway Exposed, featuring the friends and family of the contestants, and viewers were encouraged to influence the show via the website, voting whether the castaways would receive a fishing net or fishnet stocking, vinegar or champagne.
"We were disappointed with the ratings at the start," says Mills. "But the audience became much broader, accessing the show on the web and through podcasts. The feedback was phenomenal."
What was truly phenomenal was the turnaround. The show was beamed to the other side of the world daily, from a remote outpost run by power generators and satellites. It wasn't just the castaways having to contend with the island's temperamental climate, or what the British crew referred to as "five seasons in one hour". As one crew member put it, "It was the most complicated show ever", even if the castaways were blissfully unaware.
Lowdown
When: 9.30 pm, Tuesday, TV One
