If I told you that during the first episode of Alone, Channel 4’s latest reality show, a member of the great British public is eaten by a bear, another savaged by a pack of wolves and a third suffers the loss of toes and fingers from the extreme cold, then you might well want to tune in, if only for all the wrong kinds of macabre reasons. But of course, none of that happens, and indeed nothing much else untoward befalls the 11 contestants dumped in Canada’s northern wilderness to fend for themselves. Nor, one strongly suspects, will Channel 4’s large team of risk assessors (they’re given their extensive due in the closing credits) allow any such reputational harm to befall the station, having itself recently narrowly escaped the privatising predations of Nadine Dorries (herself now sadly on the brink of political extinction).
Alone is very dull, then, as boring as unkind people say Canada is. As scary goes, and despite the portentous music and Blair Witch Project vibes, it’s about as suspenseful as a Duke of Edinburgh assignment in the Lake District. The idea is that a mixed bag of “ordinary” people (ie the Z-list cast of tomorrow’s panel and reality shows) are split up and each left to build a shelter, find food and generally endure the loneliness and low-level dangers. The one who sticks it out the longest wins the most fleeting encounter with fame.
But challenging as things are supposed to be, they do look like they’ve all been given some undisclosed training pre-abandonment. For example, one of the contestants, a 28-year-old Scouse builder named Louie, seems to know that the roots of some bullrushes in the Mackenzie River are edible if boiled up. Like you do. They’ve also all been provided with 10 “survival tools” of their choice, including flints for making fire and a length of tarpaulin for a tent.
In Louie’s eccentric case, he takes along a set of bow and arrows. He clumsily deploys these to try to spike and slaughter a duck. He’d have been as well off taking the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare with him. Looking forward to a fantasy supper of “crispy duck”, Louie misses the wily waterfowl by about a mile, and breaks his arrow in the process, albeit driving it, metaphorically, through his own heart. Grinning along the way, he seems unnaturally hostile and sadistic in his murderous intentions towards the bird, its quacks mocking his Bear Grylls pretensions. Tracking his way through the majestic landscape he also tells us he feels there might be “a chance of getting some beaver”, a line delivered with a straight face that would make Julian Clary proud. Those comical interludes are some of the highlights of the proceedings, and, frustrated as Louie grows at catching his supper, be it roast duck or boiled beaver, I’ve never heard a non-cockney mumble “luvaduck” quite so often. Or at least I think that’s what he said…
Predictably enough, there’s also a Sloane type, Naomi (26, fashion designer from London), who declares “I get lost in Tesco”, yet seems remarkably adept at constructing a makeshift shelter with what she informs us knowingly is her own favoured A-frame technique, and keeping her anxieties in check. Like all the contestants, she has been filming herself (obviously no crews and catering teams are present), and, for reasons unexplained, but possibly linked to a determination to become “the next Toff” or some such, opts to video herself stripping off and skinny dipping in the beautiful lakes of the Northwest Territories. If there were public votes involved it might give her an unfair advantage, but there aren’t, so we are left with the impression that it’s just a case of, erm, naked ambition.
Which, after all, is the point of, and the flaw in, every single one of these sorts of shows ever since Channel 4 seeded the telly pandemic with Big Brother about a quarter of a century ago. To my mind, the winner of the series, albeit in an ironic sense, is already Mike from Manchester, 49, a former heroin addict blessed with the voice and demeanour of John Cooper Clarke, and who would have made an entertainingly coarse addition to the firmament of minor celebs. Poor Mike is obliged to depart after only a few hours of his stay having somehow managed axed himself in the leg. This is all the more disappointing, for him as well as the viewers, because he’s a joiner and master craftsman, but perhaps also not an especially lucky one. Bleeding, and indeed swearing uncontrollably from his self-inflicted injury, he has to call in the rescue helicopter, which does suggest that our lonely pioneers may have some modern telegraphic apparatus available to them. Anyway, Mick’s incident is probably as exciting as things are going to get on Alone until someone exits, literally, pursued by a bear. We can but hope.
