In the middle of the Canadian wilderness, 28-year-old Louie is stalking a squirrel with a bow and arrow. It’s so quiet you can hear twigs snapping. The camera shakes slightly as he nocks, draws and fires.
It’s a hit. And while the prospect of watching a builder from the West Midlands lick the eyeballs out of a charred rodent’s head might normally be deeply distressing, this is just the latest twist in Channel 4’s newest reality TV series – and I am hooked.
Brits as a nation are addicted to reality TV. Take your pick, because whatever you fancy, there’s a lane for everyone. Love Island is for those who love stilted, engineered drama, The Traitors is for those who love intrigue and Machiavellian drama, The Great British Bake Off is for those who love cakes, meringues and just a soupçon of drama, perhaps with a dash of tears.
We consume millions of minutes of the stuff, and why wouldn’t we? There’s a peculiar joy in watching Joe from next door brutally backstab poor Sheila from down the road for a cash prize, or seeing a line-up of ever-more wholesome grandmas and account executives make sculptures of the Eiffel Tower out of gingerbread.
But in recent years, the reality TV conveyor belt has been feeling staler than a day-old traybake. It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the longer a show goes on, the worse it gets. The Great British Bake Off is now entering its whopping 14th season, The Apprentice (should it air this year) its 16th.
Love Island, meanwhile, has, presumably in desperation, adopted the ‘more is more’ approach, now screening seasons twice a year – letting Brits shivering under their blankets at home suffer the spectacle of sun-bronzed influencers incongruously strutting around a South African villa every January. And that’s before we get into all the ethical questions surrounding the show: as the years have passed, its creaking apparatus has become ever more evident, in particular the emotional manipulation of its contestants in the pursuit of juicy, juicy catfights.
With contestants including Josh Denzel and Adam Collard alleging in 2019 that the aftercare being offered by the show was inadequate (ITV has since introduced a new post-show policy), and others struggling to cope with the post-season levels of fame, Love Island leaves behind an aftertaste too bitter to be enjoyed fully.
Increasingly under fire, and packed to the gills with copy-and-paste contestants, is it any wonder people are switching off? This year, Love Island’s opening episode could barely muster a million viewers, while The Apprentice’s format is so boring you can predict what the challenges are before they happen, let alone who’s going to win.
With all that in mind, Alone is a breath of fresh air. The survivor show has been done before, of course – practically every genre of reality TV has, and this has been adapted from the American series of the same name – but it’s never quite been this, well, real.
The premise is simple. Twelve garden variety Brits are dropped off in the Canadian wilderness, by themselves, with only ten ‘survival items’ to their name and some basic training in how not to die on the first night. The aim is to survive the longest out of all their competitors. At stake is the obligatory cash prize: £100,000. Enough, for some contestants, to change their lives forever.
Reader, I am addicted. As with any succession reality show, the real draw is the people themselves, and this bunch are certainly an interesting lot. There’s forager Alan, who relentlessly makes quips to the camera, despite there being nobody operating it; or craftsman Mike, who is determined to put his axe skills to good use. 26-year-old clothing designer Naomi seems entirely unsuited to the wilderness, though I suppose she might be able to competently fashion a stylish tent out of leaves, and company director Tom’s plan seems to focus entirely around using his Portsmouth heritage to fish his way to victory.
The genius of Alone is that it is entirely self-filmed. These people have to live without any form of human contact for as long as they can, which means that they are responsible for shooting footage as well as squirrels. What we get, as a result, are blurry run-ins with bears (really), skinny dipping in the Mackenzie river and even footage of the contestants injuring themselves – it’s all a bit raw and immediate and it’s absolutely brilliant.
As the show progresses, these to-camera pieces become almost a form of therapy. Naomi opens up about how attending survivalist classes helped her conquer her post-natal depression; Mike talks about being addicted to heroin in his youth and NHS project manager Eva explains how her medical issues have stopped her from making the most of life. Most of them feel disconnected from nature and want to find some stillness in a world that seems to be turning ever faster – something I imagine most people watching will be able to relate to.
And then, of course, there’s the wilderness itself. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a show where the contestants are actually in so much danger. It definitely flirts with the unethical: the very thought of being stuck in a flimsy tarpaulin shelter while a bear passes by, mere metres away, is enough to make me want to vomit. And these guys have nothing to protect themselves with except for their last-case-scenario satellite phones – or, in wild swimming coach Pip’s case, a very sharp stick.
Couple that with the extreme difficulties involved in finding food (will the contestants poison themselves? Check back next week to find out!), lighting fires and even procuring water, and Alone is basically the ultimate social experiment. What do people do when they’re completely cut off from reality – or when an unexpected setback throws their survival into question? Some will go to pieces; others will thrive.
The stakes are different, too. Who cares whether the soufflé comes out soggy? Turns out there’s nothing more riveting than coaxing a fire to light as the dusk is settling, and finding out your snare has caught a tiny mouse for a morsel of dinner. It’s a reminder of how skilled our ancestors actually were – and how much, living connected to the grid, we have to be thankful for.
So this summer, it might be time to switch Love Island off once and for all. Finally, there’s a reality TV show in town that offers something as close to different as it’s possible to get. Just don’t ask me to compete in it.
