Castaway but not adrift

I am ready, once again, to get hooked on reality tv - a repeat of the original and the best.

Castaway by the BBC, 30 minutes from town
By Nick Squires in Sydney

A former heroine addict, an 18-year-old public schoolboy and a deaf divorcee come together on an idyllic sub-tropical island this week in what the BBC hopes will be a repeat success of Castaway, the pioneer of reality television.
Seven years after 36 people were thrown together on a remote island off Scotland, the same social experiment is being tried on Great Barrier Island, in New Zealand.

Home to the Castaway volunteers: Great Barrier Island, off New Zealand. It is just a half-hour flight from Auckland
Thirteen blindfolded participants will disembark at Harataonga Bay, one of the island's stunning white sand beaches.
The idea, says the BBC, is to "take a group of Brits as far away from their current lives as possible and see if they can survive".
Aged between 18 and 64, all were single when they were first selected from 2,500 applicants. At least one, a female conservationist, has since married. Unlike in Scotland in 2000, there are no children.
They include a former RAF officer cadet, an ex-skinhead, a topless model photographer, a linguist and a woman who was once offered £10,000 to spend the weekend with someone. She turned them down.

The BBC calls it a "social experiment with a purpose" - presumably to distinguish it from the voyeurism featured on most reality TV.
Each person is reported to have a specific reason for wanting to flee more than 11,000 miles to the other side of the world - from lack of self-esteem to a broken marriage.
For the next 12 weeks the participants will be filmed as they attempt to build a self-sufficient community from meagre beginnings. The group's first task will be to make habitable a cluster of wooden huts, strengthening them against the storms and high winds that can sweep across the island and surrounding Hauraki Gulf.
Although candles will be plentiful, only one match will be provided for the entire 12-week period.
The original Castaway, set on the Scottish island of Taransay, became a media phenomenon, the precursor to more tawdry shows such as Big Brother, Celebrity Love Island and Shipwrecked.
It was intended to be worthy, middle-brow educational television but instead turned into a ratings phenomenon, with the audience gripped by fights, feuds and secret affairs.
While islanders have welcomed the cash injection from the production's 150-strong crew, they say the bay hardly represents the sort of wilderness evoked by the word castaway.
"Castaways marooned - 30 minutes from a latte" chortled the New Zealand Herald in January, when the location was announced.
The paper pointed out that Great Barrier Island is a half-hour flight or two-hour ferry ride from the comforts of Auckland, New Zealand's biggest city.
Flight times may, however, be a little longer from now on - the local airline has been asked to divert its aircraft away from Harataonga Bay for the next three months.
The bay itself is only a half-hour drive from shops, a chemist, a cafe, a golf club and an airfield. Farmers have moved their herds away from the beach in preparation for filming.
"You can't possibly have a cow mooing in the background when you're a castaway," said Izzy Fordham, who lives a mile up the road.
For company the castaways will have the endangered brown teal, known by its Maori name pateke, and the rarely seen Hochstetter's frog.
Lying 50 miles from the mainland and home to 700 people, Great Barrier was named by James Cook in 1769 and was once a thriving base for whalers.
It has the unusual distinction of having launched the world's first airmail postal service - using pigeons - in 1897.
In keeping with the castaway theme, it was a notorious site for shipwrecks, claiming many lives.
"This is one of our treasured places, and Castaway presents us with an opportunity to show it off to the world," said Dale Tawa, of New Zealand's department of conservation.
Some islanders are angry about a letter sent by the programme's location manager, asking them to avoid Harataonga Bay for the duration of the series.
"Nobody should tell a New Zealander they can't go to a beach," Joyce Gibson, who has lived on the island for 20 years, told the local paper. The show should have been filmed on private land, not in a national park, she added.
Castaways are allowed to bring a suitcase full of possessions, although writing material, books and knives are prohibited.
Each week the programme's host, Danny Wallace, will present the participants with a decision they have to make - anything from which vegetables to grow, to who will be allowed to make a telephone call home.
Castaway starts tonight on BBC1 at 9pm.

Here's what the presenter, Danny Wallace, says about the series:

"After Castaway is all over, I'll see you walking down the street when I get back, and we won't say a word to each other; we'll just hug. Because we'll have learnt a lot about human kind. This is an extraordinary programme. We're taking a gang of ordinary people and making them fend for themselves on a remote island off New Zealand where we can watch how they create a community - and how it dissolves in places. It is a responsible show - Reality with a purpose. None of our entrants wants to be a pop star. It's about getting back to basics and asking important questions. What do we really need in our lives, in terms of material things and emotional networks - can we just bring ourselves to somewhere and survive? It is reality tv which retains a sense of moral purpose."

Once again I expect it to illustrate the dynamics and truths of any human community including the one in which I live.