Eden C4 | All4
The Secret Agent BBC1 | iPlayer
Containment E4 | All4
Friday Night Dinner C4 | All4
Of all the kicks to the stomach over the past four weeks, which might you have most wished to avoid? French slaughter, obviously, and the transparent lurch to Turkish intolerance under a bloodied, fluttering tissue of democracy, but the minors also linger. An unedifying press obsession with Theresa May’s kitten heels, as if buying a pair of shoes is a substitute for a soul. Personally, I’m still shocked at the 1.2 million Brexiters who had apparently changed their minds the very next day, somehow having mistaken a vote for a menu. Perhaps we should have had the linguine after all?
Regardless, there were 23 souls who avoided it all splendidly simply by being in Lochaber, with no phones and no news, thanks to the big new Channel 4 thing, Eden. And it is big – they’re off alone for a full year, which is something of a commitment. No phones – there are no signals anyway – and they can’t know any news unless the producers choose to bung in quiet information. I’d certainly be tempted, by autumn, to whisper: “Putin and Trump are building a big fence together to keep out ideas. In the hot countries, religion won and everyone died. Jeremy Corbyn won Celebrity MasterChef. In Cornwall, a squirrel was discovered that can cure cancer but was then run over by Pippa’s 4x4…” and let them filter for truth the perfect madnesses of our age.
The difference between this and all other reality shows was, obviously, year-long commitment. I think it’s an absolute winner, and will eventually grip us all. Distressingly, this first didn’t much grip at all, but that’s so often the way with firsts. But for once we got people who could actually do things. A carpenter, Raphael, who could build things and had an overarching work ethic. A fisherman, a vet, a plumber, a chef. And, um, a… “life coach”, Tara, who, if my instincts haven’t deserted me, will soon be thrown off a high cliff, not exclusively for being a life coach (but mainly).
The much-touted premise was: if we could start again with society, how could we do it better? It’s really a question chewed over by philosophers for millennia, but who’s to say a gaggle of Channel 4 execs and a life coach can’t make a better fist? Tellingly, the credits featured a four-strong “casting team”, and it certainly looks so far as if we have a qualitatively different class of contestants: no obvious screaming divas or male hairdressers who cry over a hangnail; also, there are refreshingly to be no “trials”, “tasks” or even a winner.
But still, let us not kid ourselves over what it is. I liked Highland council’s response to the C4 planning application. “I have a wry smile when the applicant says it is a documentary,” said one councillor. “Let’s face it, it is a reality TV show.” Added another, perkily: “I am remarkably relaxed about this. It will provide a good source of nutrition for the local midges.” And, as it’s a reality show, Channel 4 can’t help but ramp up the early tensions, no matter how confected – the alleged “leader”, Anton, has already semi-defected, to start hacking out a sturdy winter shelter elsewhere, suspecting 80mph winds might, in later seasons, conceivably sweep the glorious spring beach on which the main encampment huddles. He’s right: I’ve been on that beach and they’re not 80 but 90 and arrow-straight from the Arctic.
Rather than join him in forward planning, some of the more hipster lads have decided to build a “sweat lodge”, for no discernible reason. Scotland doesn’t lack for sweaty goatees. No, it’s because Anton possesses a faintly toxic personality: think a truculent DH Lawrence with a topknot and borderline narcissistic personality disorder. Yet I suspect Anton and Raphael may be two of those eventually left standing, along with Caroline, the shepherdess, and possibly Jenna, the angry doctor. Whatever, I’m hooked, in a way that I’ve not been hooked since the very second series of I’m a Celebrity a century ago… because these 23 are not personalities. They’re people. And thus more fascinating.
The Secret Agent has been described as Joseph Conrad’s least filmable novel, involving, as it does, not big boats and compromised heroism but internal monologues, mainly. Always a bugger, internal monologues, to film: I still cringe at the 1957 attempt to do justice to Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. And, true, the focus of the book was on Winnie and her “simpleton” (as Conrad put it at the very different time) brother, the fractious two-step between love and gaping differences of intelligence, but the BBC wanted, and rather rightly, to have anarchist bombs and a little action.
Judging by the first episode (of three), I don’t think it suffered at all from this. It was dark, and seedy, and might attract some readers to the works of Conrad, if only for his timely summation of the madnesses of terrorism, as pertinent in 1886 as now. They don’t want change, they just want terror, to think themselves important.
I could watch Toby Jones until my eyes dried, but Ian Hart as the bomb-maker obviously acted him off the screen. He possibly apologised later.
Containment is an American remake of the (better) Belgian series Cordon, but it’s not bad if you can excuse the acting of Chris Wood. I’ve always been a sucker for contagion-style TV things, and this one is a beezer, 4,000 souls quarantined inside Atlanta, blood being vomited, but possibly not enough being vomited in the precise direction of Chris Wood.
At one stage, a quarantined teacher has to tell him, after he bangs his head hammily on the wall, the floor, the AC unit: “I’ve got 11-year-olds next door holding it together better than you.” Dear Chris responds by banging a fist into the wall, hammily. It’s fine – actually it’s watchably good – but could have been more fine had the words “Chris Wood” not featured. Dear Chris makes bugs, and wood, look clever.
Friday Night Dinner returned; it combines slapstick with Jewish subtlety in entirely the wrong mix but sometimes, slowly, works. Jason Watkins lifted this to glory.
