Alone (Sunday, 9pm, Channel 4) is reality TV with stakes so high that the contestants spend each night worrying they are about to be eaten by wild animals. If that’s not enough to get you watching then I’m not sure what is. If you had to script an episode of Alone, you’d start with someone going: “Shit, is that a bear?”, then they’d say: “I didn’t think this would be so hard”, then they’d get so hungry that they try to eat a twig, then they’d say: “Shit, I think that is a bear” and on it goes. It is repetitive, predictable, and I love it.
The format is well established in the US, where there have been 10 seasons, most of which made their way on to the recesses of various subscription services over here. It’s a survival show but without the superficial camaraderie of the ones where people are forced to join forces to knock up a raft out of cabers and dental floss. Here, 11 people who have an interest in the great outdoors or want to push themselves out of their everyday routines – though the sensible among us may argue that a pottery course would be a happy medium – agree to be dropped miles apart in an inhospitable wilderness. For its UK debut, the contestants arrive on the fringes of the Arctic Circle in Canada with no food, no water and only 10 chosen items to keep them going. In order to win £100,000, they have to simply stick it out for the longest. Viewers are getting value for money. While some contestants mess it up within hours, others endure it for a spectacularly lengthy period of time. The record on the US Alone is 100 days.
In order to maintain the alone part of Alone, the contestants have to film themselves, which results in a lot of talking about the stuff that they missed filming, because they were whittling themselves a toothbrush. The whole thing looks like it’s been shot by a child let loose with the camcorder at a 90s wedding. After sunset, it’s pure Blair Witch night vision, as nobody can sleep, because they’re too busy whispering “oh my god oh my god oh my god” over snapping twigs and heavy breathing. It is amazingly tense.
I would love to read the waiver form. It definitely seems more dangerous than Dancing on Ice. There are plenty of bears just casually strolling past the flimsy tarpaulin shelters that the contestants knock up in a hurry. I think it was on Race Across the World that I first heard a tent referred to as a “Ziploc for bears”, and this does little to remove the image of a human buffet. There are wolves, and moose, which I always thought were deer-sized but turn out to be the nightclub bouncers of the Canadian wilderness, massive and hulking and intense. There is fire; there are sharp objects; people get dehydrated, hungry, disoriented and distressed by the aloneness of Alone. The contestants are not so much at one with nature as trying to make it their flatmate, only to discover that it’s not particularly interested in reading the house rules.
The potential for hubris is enormous and kicks in quickly. While there are obvious objections to be made about dropping humans into a wild environment and asking them to interfere with it in order to make TV entertainment, there is a hope that it might achieve some balance by frequently pointing out how astonishing that environment is, and how impervious it can be to pathetic human interlopers. The contestants soon discover that watching a bushcraft expert on YouTube is not the same as having to wipe your backside with a stone while praying that a fish happens to stumble upon your flimsy sharp stick. We have a tendency to romanticise living off the land, but this is a handy reminder that when we did have to do that, we weren’t living much beyond 30.
Having seen more Alone than is decent, I wondered if it would feel different with British contestants. The early arrogance and certainty that Man Will Conquer is not quite so pronounced, perhaps, but it is basically the same. It turns out that there are only a set number of storylines that Alone can follow – injury, hunger, mental decline and the inevitable humbling – but I find that soothing. It reiterates the fact that nature is not there to be conquered by a wild swimming instructor or a PR executive or a retired life coach, but at best it might allow itself to be quietly respected for a brief period of time. Alone is my Love Island, and I adore it.
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Joel Golby is away
