Shipwrecked

This is a battle between two shows.  The first was a Sunday morning staple from the very earliest days of reality TV, which, when looked back on from 2019, is imbued with youthful nostalgia and innocence.  The second is a reboot of the format after nearly a decade’s hiatus.  The cynic in me wonders if this return is a response to the discovery by ITV2 of the formula for 16-34 TV gold: beautiful young people minus clothing plus sunny island equals captive audience (that would otherwise be on Instagram and not watching telly).  Yes, I was talking about Love Island just then everybody, but this post is about Shipwrecked in all of its guises, on T4, e4 and Channel 4, and with and without its suffix: colon Battle Of The Islands.

Cast your minds back.  It’s nearly the Millennium (which I still think of as the Minnellium, as the word better encapsulates the absolute naffness of this pointless event) and we children have been brought by our mother to Devon for a party with old family friends.  I remember two things: my sister’s guinea pig died while we were away, continuing our pets’ tradition of snuffing it on special occasions, and I laughed so hard during a game of cards that I farted loudly in front of my parents’ grown-up friends.  But, at the same time, months before Big Brother, Shipwrecked came to our screens.  Those first series, one running in 2000 and two (yes, two!) following in 2001, were from a more naïve era.  There was no competition.  This was simply a documentary crew following young people living a back-to-basics existence while receiving permanent skin damage in the sun of the South Pacific.  Animals were slaughtered, people got sand in their cracks, and dramas ensued about kissing boys and raising gay community flags.  But this wasn’t 24-hour surveillance; a film crew chased the islanders among the palms, waving a boom and clutching cameras, so we never knew how much was reality and how much was showing off.  Rumours later abounded that the juiciest action never made it to air: an island strewn with condom wrappers was the only physical evidence of how the crew and the cast inevitably succumbed to the holiday combination of heat, scantily cladness and being away.

Five years later, the format returned, only this time there were two islands.  And they were at war.  Adding some spice and jeopardy, new arrivals would appear each week, spending time with rival tribes before ultimately picking their permanent home.  The most populous tribe would nab some prize money, which, once divided twenty-five ways, was probably just enough to cover the psychological counselling anyone would need after spending weeks in a tropical paradise and then having to return to the UK.  As a sixth former, this was religious viewing.  You needed to be able to enter the common room debate about whether you’d rather be a Tiger or a Shark.  I honestly can’t remember which of the two was the tribe for me, but I do know it was the same animal each series.  T4, a curious youth strand on Channel 4, had cornered the market in weekend morning hangover TV, and we, graduating from being Inbetweeners, were more or less legally allowed to drink alcohol.  Every weekend was filled with eighteenth birthday parties and all the Smirnoff Ices you could drink.  Shipwrecked: Battle Of The Islands was perfect viewing.

I would go into more detail on what occurred in these episodes between 2006 and 2009, but this period, at least in terms of the internet, is a very long way away.  How we’re able to excavate ancient ruins and carbon-date millennia-old fossils, yet I can’t find a non-pixellated image of the 2008 cast is beyond me.  I do recall, though, that at some point, the scheduling shifted from weekend mornings to weekday evenings.  More specifically, Tuesdays.  In this age before reliable catch up and when your dad still controlled the VCR, I was devastated.  On Tuesday nights I pushed trolleys around the car park of Waitrose in Cobham.  I still therefore miss the series I never saw, despite the generous wages and benefits of the John Lewis Partnership.  Instead, I have memories of dodging the BMWs and Audis while fetching back the abandoned shopping carts, refusing to wear the high-vis jacket even when it snowed as it stunk of someone else’s BO, overhearing mums telling their children to work hard at school so they didn’t end up like me (despite me having a place at Oxford) until I finally got moved indoors.  Ramming twelve trolleys into the back of a Mercedes might have been part of it (the driver was still inside).

One series I was able to enjoy fully was the 2008 season.  This was when I started my job in media.  It was July 2008.  I had misspent a year in a headhunting firm where people were very serious, discussing the economy or rugby or braying about their children.  I had got in constant trouble so I was determined to keep a low profile in this new role.  I would resist piping up in all office discussions until I had proven I was good at my job.  But then, I overheard new colleagues (who are still beloved to this day) talking about the previous night’s episode of Shipwrecked.  It took all my willpower (and there’s not much) to resist wheeling over there in my desk chair and joining in.  But what it did prove was that I had come to the right place.

And now, it’s back.  This time, we’re broadcasting at 9pm each weeknight on e4, so we can have as much swearing and boobies as we like.  Sadly missing is Morcheeba’s The Sea, a track I will forever associate with Shipwrecked.  We have a new narrator.  Gone are Andrew Lincoln and Craig Kelly, both of whom sounded bored out of their minds while describing the antics of attention-seeking twentysomethings.  Vick Hope gently pokes fun at the characters, but mostly gets on with it, which somehow leaves me craving the acid-tongued lashings of Love Island’s Iain Stirling.  But much is the same.  Even Aygo by Toyota (the old sponsor of T4) is back on board (shout out to the friend who did this deal).  We have Sharks and we have Tigers.  The ante is upped though, as the new arrivals, who have so far in this first week come in pairs, also have to be picked by the island they choose, with a mismatch resulting in a one-way ticket back to Blighty.  This has brought high tension and just desserts, though I have just watched the fifth episode, where the complication of having a pair of identical twins as the arrivals made the format seem slightly cruel.  Having gone through secondary education with five twins in my form of thirty (and a further two pairs in the year group – clearly something in the water in Horsley) my twindar felt quite sensitive to the onslaught.

Sadly I’m not yet watching this on a massive f***-off telly in my own home.  I can pick between the non-HD live broadcast where I’m overwhelmed by adverts, or catch up on All4, where I’m overwhelmed by adverts.  Both scenarios also include the inhabitants of the flat upstairs, divided from ours by a ceiling made presumably of hopes and dreams, stomping about constantly, so if I’m not distracted by the heel-walking of the morbidly obese, I’m squinting at the low-def picture, filling in the gaps with my imagination.  This year, the Sharks are a lovely bunch, while the Tigers have a nastier streak.  I’m therefore definitely a Tiger, as that sort of person is always more interesting.

Is it as good as we remember?  Well, after some acclimatisation, this could be a vintage year.  Times have changed, and it’s hard to work out if this is a dating show or a survivalist documentary.  In addition, I’m now ten years older than most of the contestants, rather than them seeming like inhabitants of a distant future adulthood that was years away.  I can’t help but wonder if it would be rewarding if the cast had greater maturity and life experience.  Maybe I could bowl up: hi, I’m Rob; I’m 33 and work in advertising; I enjoy too much telly and going to bed early.  Maybe not.  It’s just that these young people seem to shriek so much.  There’s a boat: cue screaming.  There’s a palm tree: cue caterwauling.  There’s a pontoon: cue sh*t being lost.  Then a friend articulated my reservation perfectly: this is hangover TV, but we don’t have hangovers.