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| TV,
Jerry Carpenter,
20 January 1999 |
Rating: F5
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I’m Lazy – I was supposed to review this last week when the hype was really hitting the fan, but got distracted by a seriously pleasant day in the park. Probably a good thing too, as this time last week I was going to deal out my first F0 I was that irritated by it – ten dullards and some chickens filmed live round the clock in an enclosed flat in Bromley-by-Bow.
The first week was excruciating – lot’s of dull chit-chat, all of the subjects of the ‘social experiment’ behaving horribly self-conscious of the cameras, all of ‘em behaving right ‘wacky’. Like some piss poor suburban version of ‘Ibiza Uncovered’ without the funny drunken yobby boys and fanny-exposing jailbait gals. Even the much heralded web cam stuff is a blow out – no toilet cam, no bonking, no image choice control, just sliced together footage of the gang going through their daily routine of eating porridge, sitting on deck-chairs, and swapping boring anecdotes. It seemed as if C4 had gone to such pains to select ten people who’d interact in a sparky pro-active manner and then put them in an environment which 10 homely unemployed slobs with tissue paper and pot noodles for a month could have made much more of.
All a disappointment then, until last Friday, when someone had to be picked and kicked. Suddenly ten people desperate to come off looking cool are faced with an eviction vote and become waaaay more interesting under the microscope. The group began to split onto girl and boy camps, the boys bitching about vacuous hippy Sada and sour faced gross entity Caroline, the girls becoming more and more wary of nasty twat Andrew and scheming posh Nicholas. And all the time the totally enclosed environment seems more and more claustrophobic. And then the toilet paper runs out. Ha-ha.
It hits you that the first week of building dislike for these cretins has set-up the following weeks of tension and paranoia as completely compelling television. When finally the house votes on Sada and Caroline to be potentially evicted its gripping stuff. Then when Joe Public chip in and for the chop it’s a blinding moment – she’s tripped off into an insane ‘happy to be out/shocked to be judged the worst’ loop. The guys are in the bedroom high-fiving and bouncing off the walls, the girls group hugging in the bedroom.
So there may be no bonking. And the fantasy scenario of checking the web-cam in the morning to find all of them lying in pools of blood around the living room while the ‘quiet’ Irish guy runs round naked and gibbering in the chicken coop with a knife between his teeth may not occur. But if every Thursday for the next eight weeks these poor saps are forced to go do-lally live on TV then I’m sure I’ll find the time to tune in.
Channel 4 Most Nights
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