Take me off this island

By GREG DIXON


You might be excused for thinking that TV2 has been running repeats at 7.30pm on Tuesdays for the past couple of weeks.

Treasure Island Extreme looks so much like Treasure Island (not-so-extreme), Survivor and all those other stick-a-bunch-of-misfits-in-the-bush-and-watch-'em-scrap shows that it feels like an attack of some malevolent form of deja vu.

We've all been here before. The set-up is always the same: select your misfits, transport them to Destination Hell, provide them with a series of "challenges" to earn rewards such as food and water, then ask them to eliminate each other until the most accomplished (read devious) misfit wins.

The only real difference is that the men and women behaving badly (the men threaten each other, the women sob) are former or current Army, Navy or police types, supposedly well-trained to cope with tough conditions.

The publicity for the show likes to describe them as "elite". Clearly TV2 has a looser definition of the word than the rest of us. While one claims to be erstwhile SAS, another is an ex-Army chef - though I'm sure she's plenty handy, if not dangerous, with a spatula.

Last week's second episode found the 16 contestants divided into two teams, red and blue, with red thirsty as horses and blue hungry as hell as day four of their 25-day desert-island adventure dawned.

The highlights were few. Red did a little cheating to earn them some water, leading to an acrimonious trading session. Eventually, as the hour dragged to an end, two were tossed off the island.

The most entertaining bit, I'm afraid to say, was where someone got hurt. Tomo (ex-Navy, currently police) managed to cut his leg on coral while fishing in the shallows.

Horse, a brickie who spent 20 years in the Army, decided he would describe the wound for viewers in unnecessary detail.

"He's got a big gash on the lower leg," Horse began. "It's more a hollow, quite deep, and he gouged out quite a bit of the meat from his leg. He's going a little bit pale but he's all right."

I laughed. We then had a close-up of where Tomo's bit of meat used to be. I stopped laughing.

Horse is good television. Mad as a cut snake, he's clearly in his element drinking goat's blood and rubbing charcoal on his body and face.

He should win through force of personality. He should also be given his own Heartland-Meets-Band-Of-Brothers reality show at the earliest possible convenience.

But host Jacqui Rickards, a "top model", is an anaemic television presence. While she no doubt has the look for presenting (thin, tanned), she has a voice like a fishwife and delivers her script like a third-form speech contestant.

On the other hand, Bomber the island "arbitrator" has presence all right: he looks and sounds like a bouncer who's about to give his fists a little exercise on your face.

He pretty much sums up the attitude developing here - one I won't be returning for.

What these shows teach us about human beings is pretty much what we already knew: that people put under pressure in harsh conditions aren't very nice to each other. And that other human beings, for some unfathomable reason, like to watch such unpleasantness.

Did we need a repeat of this baloney, even an "extreme" repeat, to remind us?