'If this is paradise, give me hell': the camping shows Lena Dunham should watch

A journey into horror, an epic adventure in self-discovery, or a soggy family nightmare? As the writer of Girls remakes the British sitcom Camping, we provide some inspiration

Lena Dunham’s first TV show since the end of Girls will be a remake of the 2016 Julia Davis series Camping, a comedy so deliciously bleak about the great outdoors that it’s a wonder the tourist board didn’t sue. The new HBO version has been transported to the US and stars Jennifer Garner and David Tennant as Kathryn and Walt, a middle-aged couple taking a camping trip to celebrate Walt’s 45th birthday, with a particularly precise itinerary and friends that are varying degrees of awful.

It promises to be faithful to the macabre chaos of the original, though it will be interesting to see how Dunham and co-creator Jenni Konner turn such a British experience into an American one. Traditionally, American camping stories, in films or on TV, seem to fall into two categories. There are the vast adventures that romanticise outdoor living as a rite of passage or voyages of self-discovery: Reese Witherspoon packed her life up into a backpack to walk the Pacific Crest trail and fight grief and addiction in Wild; the boys of Stand By Me talked into the night around the campfire; and for the wandering explorer kids of Moonrise Kingdom, camping is an escape from authoritarian adulthood.

Then there are the horror stories, which take every urban legend uttered at a sleepover and turn them into vivid nightmares, tapping into primal fears of everything that could possibly go wrong in the dark. From Deliverance to Black Rock to The Blair Witch Project, the message of these tense, terrifying thrillers is to never leave the comfort of a hot power shower again. Think you’re an outdoorsy type? Let’s see how you feel about it now this bunch of twigs fashioned into the shape of a child is suddenly dangling over your tent. The closest I’ve ever got to such horror was turning up at a festival at night, during torrential rainfall, only to find that we’d brought the tent, but forgotten the poles. The memory remains chilling.

Like Camping, Ben Wheatley’s 2012 black comedy Sightseers – about caravanning, technically, though the experience is not dissimilar – explores the dark side of life outdoors. Candy Evans is the test editor of the Camping and Caravanning Club, and as a professional, she laughs at her initial reaction to it. “I thought, OK, it’s a film about serial killers, but I’m sure Camping and Caravanning Club members will be more concerned that the people involved plugged their electric hook-up leads in unsafely.” Does she think there’s something in the fact that so many films about camping and caravanning incorporate an element of crime? There’s the fact that it’s easier to escape the scene if your home is portable, she says, but it’s also simply to do with atmosphere. “Sometimes you do go on to a campsite and think, is this a setting for Midsomer Murders?”

Watch the trailer for Sightseers. WARNING: VIOLENT SCENES

But even Sightseers, with all of its murdering, is a comedy. The Festival, this summer’s Inbetweeners-ish caper about a group of friends celebrating graduation via every music festival cliche under the rainclouds, speaks to a very British kind of camping, which is to say that British films and TV shows seem incapable of taking it seriously at all. Nick and Shane squash into a tiny pop-up tent that smells of urine, is hotter than the sun, and seems to be brighter on the inside than it is on the outside. It’s part of a long tradition of camping farce, which has been going strong since Carry on Camping pegged out its flysheet at a site called Paradise almost 50 years ago. Though most people remember it for the enthusiasm of Barbara Windsor’s aerobic activities, there’s also Sid James’s droll assessment of his situation: “If this is Paradise, give me hell.”

The vastness and the drama of American landscapes give its camping stories a certain innate grandeur; likewise, the smallness of Britain and its unpredictable weather lend themselves to dry wit and self-deprecation. The best camping film of all time is Mike Leigh’s 1974 Play for Today, Nuts In May, which captures the fraught microcosm of campsite life perfectly, as Keith ultimately explodes with anger about the noisy radio and their drunken, chattering neighbours shattering the peace. It still feels current now, with its gentle mockery of people trying to get in touch with nature. As the health-conscious Keith and poetic Candice Marie (“Now locate the eyelet, Candice Marie”) pay dreamy tribute to the harmonious sounds being carried along the country air, we see that it’s the noise of the machinery powering a factory farm full of caged chickens.

Amy Ruffell is a TV producer who has shot numerous camping scenes for documentaries over the years. “It always feels like a very British kind of chaos,” she explains. “There’s endless humour in people’s inability to put up a tent. No matter how slick you think you are, you only ever do it about once every four years, and it’s impossible.” The experience of camping in Britain is inherently and specifically funny, she says. “Everything is slightly damp. Even if it’s hot, you wake up with condensation on you, and you’re like, oh, I’m still damp. Just warm, and damp. The weather’s never quite as good as you’d hoped it would be, and things flap in the wind and keep you awake. It’s always tinged with a slight bit of misery,” she laughs. “That’s what makes it so fun to film.”

Contributor

Rebecca Nicholson

The GuardianTramp

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