Castaway 2000 (BBC 1, Tuesday & Wednesday)
Charlie's Angels Night (Channel 4, Saturday)
20/20 (TV3, Sunday)
Escape From Antartica (RTE 1, Thursday)
DY2K (TG4, Friday)
`I am a pain in the ass person and I am a skipper," said Kim (44). Well, he was and he wasn't. He certainly was a pain in the ass and he insisted on being a leader. But his combination of arrogance and incompetence ensured that the only leading he would ever do would be into difficulty. So, on an orienteering exercise with eight other people, the wannabe Napoleon, despite the piffling detail that he couldn't read a map, took command and soon had the entire team hopelessly lost. Lesson number one: people who desperately want to lead are almost certainly the worst equipped to do so.
Kim's leadership performance could be seen on Castaway 2000, the BBC's hugely hyped, creative docusoap. With standard docusoaps having exhausted hotel, airport, jail, council estate, cruise ship and other "real life" situations, television is now opting for more inventive settings. Three miles long and two miles wide, the usually uninhabited island of Taransay in the Outer Hebrides is home throughout this year to what the Beeb rather grandly calls "the social experiment of a new community for a new millennium". Twenty-eight adults and eight children have been chosen to live there throughout 2000.
Channel 4's Shipwrecked (Wednesdays) is in a similar vein but is merely following the fortunes of 16 hormone-horror 18 to 24-year-olds in Moturaku in the South Pacific for 10 weeks. Anyway, over four nights (two this week and two next) scenes from the selection process to decide the membership of the new Taransay community are being shown. More than 4,000 people applied and if Kim, never mind Des (35) and Jack (69), were promising enough to make it to the serious trials stage, the talent dismissed at the first cut must have been spectacular indeed.
On the face of it, gaining a place on Taransay appears like an ideal opportunity to drop out of society for a year. In truth, however, it's really a case of living in an intensified version of society and with TV cameras present to record your performance. During the trials some realities became clear, principal among them being the fact that families, in spite of the emotional smugness often found in such primary blood groupings, are better than singles at arranging relationships with other people. Family values, it would appear, will be at least as crucial as SAS ones on Taransay.
So far, Ben (25), a former public schoolboy, who works as a picture editor for Tatler magazine, has been the star. The female psychologist among the team picking the punters to live on Taransay, gushed that he is "an ideal leader" and even mentioned the word "superman". Ben, to be fair, has been impressive but "class confidence" is probably a more truthful description than "natural leadership" of the quality which makes him suitable. It's nurture, not simply nature, which tends to count in these gigs, despite patrician propaganda to the contrary.
Life will be stressful for the Taransay crew. Slaughtering your own food and managing your own sewage system is not everybody's cup of tea. The presence of cameras and the knowledge that millions will get to hear about the outcome next January renders it rather artificial, of course. Being cast away into the intense glare of the public makes it all rather like Fame meets Robinson Crusoe or perhaps, Lord of the Flies. Come to think of it, the fact that this creative docusoap also has a sort of game show element - Kim and Jack have not been picked; Ben, the equally confident Tammy (26) and dreadful Des have - makes it a really bizarre, if intriguing, hybrid of TV genres.
FROM programming of the future to a staple of the past: Charlie's Angels Night reminded you that back in the 1970s, girl power going undercover usually meant exposure in bikinis. Looking back, it's easy to see the cult series as a bizarre combo of showbiz and early Californian feminism. Heroines with big hair, big teeth, lip gloss, "jiggle appeal" and often as many as 10 clothes changes per episode, the Angels regularly knocked the crap out of males with the physiques and brain power of gorillas.
Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith and Cheryl Ladd pitched up to talk about the series. Farrah Fawcett Majors, however (who was replaced by Ms Ladd) did not. Apparently during a 1997 appearance on The David Letterman Show she seemed confused and incoherent. But the "Farrah flick", a central element of her feather-cum-mullet hairdo, was recalled by a number of female fans. In the show's first season, during which, in terms of popularity, Ms Majors eclipsed her co-stars, the "Farrah flick" became the most aped coiffure gimmick of its age.
Then there were the teeth. Clive James used to have a theory that the majority of men watching Charlie's Angels had unspoken desires to be eaten alive. Even by current standards, it must be conceded that the dentistry on display, remains impressive, if not downright frightening. Ireland has since followed suit, of course, and along with an alarming increase in the number of blondes on the loose, the ravenous Jaws look is becoming ubiquitous. Such sublime dentition, even though it bespeaks airheadedness, is preferable to the traditional, gapped grin, of course. But it's the dentists who can best afford to smile at the current excesses.
Charlie's Angels was the Baywatch of its time. Now the feminist tradition in mainstream TV is crossed with the S&M leather look of Xena, Warrior Princess and even with vampirism in Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. Like Castaway 2000, these are all hybrid forms but, as ever, they depend for most of their appeal on making use of female forms. Whether or not this represents the empowerment or the exploitation of women, you can decide for yourself.
Watching 20/20: Stolen Lives - We Were Only Children, you were left in no doubt about the exploitation, indeed brutalisation of young girls in Ireland's industrial schools. These 1950s social castaways recalled lives of humiliation which often led on to terrible suffering with sexual relationships, drink and drug problems and psychological scars which will never fully heal. Produced and directed by Louis Lentin, this one was, in effect, the sister programme of last year's Stolen Lives, which dealt with the treatment of boys in the industrial school system.
There's neither need nor space to detail the familiar catalogue of horrors inflicted on the unfortunate women who spoke straight to Lentin's camera. It's clear that the scale of abuse was such that fatigue at the story is inevitably growing. More alarming than even that however, is the abysmally low level of debate on the issue which is now besmirching the media. Clearly, every cleric was not a monster and many were kind. But the obfuscation of the core vileness by aggrandising ludicrously disproportionate and barely logical arguments to equal status with the real story is dangerous and ill-judged.
Of course, there are always (at least) two sides to every story. But that is not to say that each side is always equally valid. For a complex of reasons, almost always greater than any of the individuals involved, Irish society produced a disgraceful system of industrial schools. Even so, there are still degrees of individual guilt. But in allowing the elevation of what are essentially footnote quibbles to core importance, the media risks outrageous disproportion and a compounding of the awful hurt done to the people who told their stories to Louis Lentin and also to the thousands who didn't.
A TALE of real castaways was told on Escape From Antartica, a riveting documentary, which partly re-enacted the story of the survival epic of Ernest Shackleton and his colleagues back in 1916. After their ship was sunk by pack ice, the 27 explorers made their way in small boats to Elephant Island. From there, Shackleton led a half-dozen men across 800 miles of raging, freezing ocean to South Georgia. Three of them then crossed the frozen, mountainous 30-mile interior of that island to its only whaling station. As a result, all 27 were eventually saved.
The Irish crew following, in 1997, the ice, sea and land trail of Kildare-born Shackleton were forced to abandon boat 300 miles out from Elephant Island. A back-up ship brought them on however and they successfully crossed South Georgia. There was, of course, a Boys Own feel to the whole undertaking but the hardships of this one were such that even as an armchair traveller, you could sense the churning seasickness and the intense cold. After this stuff, Taransay looks like Bermuda. A genuinely sensational story and produced on a modest budget. Good stuff.
Finally, DY2K, TG4's new interior design series. Although there have been too many of these "makeover" efforts in recent times, this one seems inventive enough to deserve a place in the schedules. Based on the idea of hiring an artist and two handymen for two days and alloting a budget of £500 for materials, a room is "transformed". Certainly Lisbeth Mulcahy, a Danish weaver living in Dingle, did an admirable job on the taped episode I've seen. Though ably presented by Maire Moriarty, perhaps a makeover of her extraordinary cardigan-wearing style should be considered. After all, even the "Farrah flick" could probably have been prevented at source.