WHAT ELSE IS AT GARDENCROFT??

JAILBREAK ON C5

BILLY GATES AND DICKIE BRANSON WANT TO RUN THE LOTTERY (I'M SENDING THEM MY SHIRT AS WELL!)

INTO V.W BEETLES AND CAMPER VANS? CHECK THIS OUT

CAROLS' MOM AND BABY PAGE ALL YOUR PREGNANCY FAQ'S ANSWERED HERE

TESTING BALLISTIC MISSILES ON THE ISLE OF WIGHT?? THEY DID IN THE FIFTIES!! CLICK HERE

THE GARDENCROFT HOMEPAGE--ALL THIS AND MORE

TOO WOOLLY BY HALF!!

Monday January 24, 2000

The southern softies cast adrift by the BBC (along with camera crew, sound engineers, director, mobile phones and a construction team to put a roof on for them) did not even last a fortnight. Despite all that intensive selection and training shown in the first programmes of Castaway last week, the Outer Hebrides proved too much. It was unfair, said the producer, that 20 people should sleep in one room; some had flu; the builders had not yet put in all mod cons. So he decided to call in Harris Air and helicopter some of them off Taransay to the urban delights of Tarbett. They have spent the best part of their sojourn in the wilds in holiday flats, down the road from pub and fish and chip shop.

The predictable response is to sneer. Just to see the would-be castaways confronting such elementary tasks of rural economy as wringing a hen's neck, milking a cow and shovelling the shit, predicted how they would shape up once they had left the cosseted confines of training camp for the real thing: wind speeds off the Beaufort scale, raging seas, illness, misery and all. Robinson Crusoe did not get to scamper back to civilisation and its creature comforts until he had learned self-reliance.

And yet, isn't there something worth celebrating in how unlike that proto- imperialist adventurer these BBC castaways are turning out to be? Their only empire is the sheep and the black deer - no natives to be exterminated or enslaved. (Gaelic speakers have been kept well out of shot.) These post-modern castaways inherit an empty space. Gulliver, Crusoe, even the Swiss Family Robinson were discovering themselves; but castaways in an imperial age necessarily gained knowledge from other, different people. The age of empire is over; now it is the inner territory which fascinates. What the producers of this show want is confrontation with inner selves leading to an exhibition of group dynamics - a soap opera in the Hebridean wind and rain.

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