- guardian.co.uk, Sunday May 27 2001 01.14 BST
- The Observer, Sunday May 27 2001
Survivor ITV
Surviving the Iron Age BBC1
The Fabulous Bagel Boys BBC1
EastEnders BBC1
Survivor got a bit carried away with itself last Tuesday when, after precisely one - count 'em - episode of the million pound prize tribal game show ( It's A Knockout meets The Beach, relocated to an island near Borneo with sets borrowed from Trader Vic's) the first person to be voted off the island by his fellow contestants was given his own primetime Half-hour ITV chat show, interviewed by John Leslie in front of a live studio audience. His name? 'Nasty' Nick Carter, the former naval scuba diver, in case you've already forgotten (and who could blame you? We met him on a Monday, he was in the tabs on Tuesday and was very long gone by Sunday, as Craig David might have put it). I know that 'celebrity' is as cheaply acquired and swiftly disposable as a Bic these days (though much less useful), but a programme that stopped just short of featuring a moist-eyed Nick surrounded by his loved ones and presented with a big red book made This Is Your Life's retired first division footballers and actors from Casualty appear deserving of knighthoods for services above and beyond the call of light entertainment.
By Thursday, bossy, patronising JJ, late of the RAF, had taken to calling all the girls 'honey' with a barely suppressed sneer (especially those in underwired bikinis and lacking cellulite), so was forced to extinguish her flame at the tribal council meeting after a cliffhanger of a vote. 'As you know, fire represents your life on this island...' explained the presenter Mark Austin, with due gravitas, before JJ flounced off, angrily - 'I'd just like to say I know exactly who voted against me...' - and onto her own Friday night chat show.
So far, the show itself makes for oddly enervating and therefore slightly depressing viewing. Most of the contestants are caught up in petty squabbles which distract them from doing much in the way of surviving: though they were meant to be fending for themselves after the first few days, they were still hungry, raiding the emergency supplies to supplement their grim meals of sauteed rat and diced sharklet.
Meanwhile, the production values are distractingly high: all those swooping helicopter shots of rainbow horizons and sunset-swamped beaches, complex looking props and sets, and Mark Austin, in a selection of crisply-pressed shirts and chinos, desperately trying not to compromise his journalistic integrity. Perhaps the knowledge that just out of sight there is a comfortable production base loaded to the gunwales with freshly-baked baguettes and pots of Marmite has sapped any real sense of pioneer spirit.
And if they will keep voting off anybody with an ounce of vim and vigour we shall soon be left with the predictable selection of telegenic types in fluoro swimwear, stuffing messages to their mums into bottles and weeping inside their sleeping bags.
Mind you, things are not looking much more promising in Pembrokeshire, where week three of Surviving The Iron Age saw the experiment descend into complete chaos. I vividly remember the 1970s version of this show and I'm fairly certain that the producers didn't resort to bringing in a 'motivation coach' to teach the tribe how to communicate with each other, though perhaps this is only because motivation coaches didn't exist. Apart from the sweetly dippy New Age Chris - a beardy, herbalist, pagan, vegan, 'hello-trees, hello-sky' ground-kissing tin-whistle-player who is revelling in the lifestyle - practically everyone else has revealed themselves to be a typically twenty-first century passive-aggressive wuss. This lot can't cook, either (food poisoning from undercooked chicken threatened to wipe them all out in the first few days), won't work together, clearly regret their choice of 'tribal chief' (earthy Anne, out of her depth issuing orders) and thus moan and squabble endlessly. The relationship between baffled Anne and angry Yasmin (on being questioned about the authenticity of her non-Iron Age knitting she observed, 'tough, I've just invented it!') has collapsed completely and the whole experiment is starting to look, somewhat surreally, like Dennis Potter's Blue Remembered Hills , in which adult actors played children, with predictably dark and unpleasant results.
If we take the respective tribes as a vaguely representative cross-section of British society, can it be true that we were always this soft, disrespectful of leadership, defensive, undisciplined and constitutionally unable to compromise or work alongside others without feeling bullied or cajoled? Were we always so emotionally raw, without boundaries and flailing, or is it a relatively recent development, this climate of slippery selfishness and foot-stampingily petty rage? You can (and I will) criticise the reality gameshows all you want, but if there's one thing the Castaway 2000/Big Brother/Survivor genre is good for, it's holding up a mirror to an undercurrent of collective anger and pig-headed 'me-first' selfishness. Sometimes it's important to be reminded of how profoundly emotionally unevolved we really are - and that it might be all you need to get your own ITV chat show.
Welcome light relief, then, in The Fabulous Bagel Boys (and you'd better pronounce it right: Bygle, not Baygle) - probably the first Glaswegian-Jewish police comedy drama - though there seemed to be some confusion as to the constituent ingredients of a burger, which slightly undermined the premise. Denis Lawson played the very kosher Detective Inspector Morris Rose, who would have been a rabbi but for a tricky bit of business with a shiksa while he was studying the Torah. His brother, Lionel, meanwhile, runs the family deli, Rose's (cock-a-leekie soup with kneidel), alongside his wife and Morris's luscious daughter, Rachel, and was busy having bother with the Beth Din over his kosher licence. Anyway, in the line of duty Morris acquired himself a mysterious new sidekick, brooding Londoner Detective Sergeant Murchison (Michael French), and the pair set out to solve a murder (that wasn't) and a kidnapping (that wasn't, either).
Somewhere along the way it was revealed that the Detective Inspector had, in the absence of his preferred lunchtime smoked salmon and cream cheese 'bygle', preferably made by his daughter's fair hands, occasionally succumbed to the contents of a yellow Styrofoam box. He was embarrassed about his burger and Murchison made a joke about 'falling off the wagon'. Call me pedantic, but we ought to get a few things straight here and now: was Morris embarrassed simply because his burger wasn't kosher? And, if so, that does seem rather implausible because it must be awfully difficult to be a serving police officer working all those unsociable hours and stick faithfully to a kosher diet (I'm sure police canteens don't pass muster with the Beth Din).
Or was he perhaps embarrassed because he had eaten a hamburger ? In which case, confusion reigns: hamburgers are, of course, made from beef and named after the city of Hamburg, not constructed from and named for the flesh of the pig. You may think this detail unworthy of comment but I thought it important because the show was as much about consuming kosher foodstuffs as it was about tackling crime, and also because, apart from this hiccup, I rather liked The Fabulous Bagel Boys.
So, Sharon Watts has returned to Albert Square and her spiritual home behind the bar of the Queen Vic. Well, after six years in Florida with Angie (yes, she lives on - if only in backstory - probably playing a lot of golf and forming alcohol-soused liaisons at the nineteenth hole) and having nothing better to do than acquire nylon hair extensions and visit Disneyworld, the relentlessly miserablist microclimate of Walford is bound to look attractive to any emotionally dysfunctional 30-year-old woman. Altogether, last week's EastEnders plots reached a pinnacle of soap-campery, diced into scenes of such increasing rapidity that, surely, soon, all those time-consuming scripts with-words will be abandoned in favour of a series of excitable mimes: door-slamming, crying, raising eyebrows, furrowed frowning, head-shaking, sighing, more door slamming and tears, with explanatory subtitles available only on Ceefax.
