KEY POINTS:
There has been a bit of scoffing about the latest Castaway being set on Great Barrier Island. This is because it is supposed to be a place that is not at all isolated. It has shops, restaurants and nice places to stay where you can get breakfast in bed.
Well, having been there, I think I can safely assert that plonking a bunch of plonkers from Britain there would, if they let them loose into the civilisation that is Great Barrier, make this Castaway a vastly more entertaining prospect than sticking them on one of the more isolated bits has so far proved to be.
Not that I'm suggesting there is anything, well, strange about the inhabitants of Great Barrier but you tend to get an interesting assortment of people who choose to go and live in what passes for glorious isolation.
I just don't know why they went to all the trouble of importing a bunch of weirdoes from some other place.
The strangest person is the host, Danny Wallace, who appears to be going for a tone somewhere between archly ironic and plain idiotic. I thought the idea was that you set up a bunch of people, chosen for their ability to be ghastly, in an isolated community and stand back and watch how they manage. Alone. Except for the cameras, obviously.
I think we could manage to work out how they get on. Which is, or is meant to be, badly. Because that's what passes as entertainment and sold as an amazingly interesting social experiment.
On Castaway we get Danny popping up to say illuminating things like: "Hmm, bit of tension there."
But not very much, actually.
And why is he wearing a suit and what appears to be white sand shoes? I hope they don't let him loose around the civilised bits of Great Barrier. He might get shot by a Greenie for being an exotic species.
The producers chose Jonathan because he did a good sales job. "If I go into a room with 10 people in it, the eight of them are going to dislike me within the first eight to 10 minutes." He likes being annoying; it amuses him. It is not very interesting to watch.
It obviously never occurred to the producers that anyone who boasted about how annoying they are might have an over-inflated opinion about how interesting this actually makes them. It is a universal truth, well, one known to those of us addicted to America's Next Top Model (why can't they just play the next series, now?), that the truly annoying are those who think they're, like, really nice, caring, sharing people who just want to help by pointing out other people's defects, who are the really annoying people.
Perhaps its exotic location will have sold Castaway to the overseas audience. To me it just looks like a bit of sand and scrubby grass and there is one thing about Barrier: there are beautiful bits.
But, "even the shots of New Zealand are shite - and it's the most beautiful country in the world", said somebody on a Guardian message board.
How rude, not to mention ridiculous. The only possible reason I can think of for going to Great Barrier (well, I couldn't easily get a crayfish there which would be the other reason) is because it is so beautiful. And isolated. In bits.
And as I am raising the ridiculous, why didn't they just go to the Barrier and make a series about the people who already live there in an isolated community, where you just might get ready-made tensions and some interesting observations about a ready-made social experiment?
