Eden: Channel 4 reality series seeks volunteers to build their own utopia

Brits tired of the rat-race are being sought to create their own perfect society from scratch in a Channel 4 series which promises to replicate the impact of Big Brother.

Twenty highly skilled volunteers will build their own utopia in a remote community, where they will live, hunt and sleep together for an entire year, whilst being filmed by fixed rigs cameras.

The new series, called Eden, is seeking a diverse group of people, ranging from fishermen to foragers, builders to engineers and entertainers, ready to cast aside their previous lives and begin again.

Eden will attempt to tap into the rejection of capitalist values reflected in the surge of young supporters which helped Jeremy Corbyn seize the Labour leadership.

Their pioneers will be asked to create their own society and rules in a “remote and isolated part of the northern hemisphere”. A location in Scotland has been mooted.

Unlike Big Brother however, there will be no producers seeking to manipulate behaviour or evictions from the community – unless they are cast out of the garden of Eden by the settlers themselves.

Much of the filming will be done by the participants, who will also be given cameras, as they seek to make the best of their desolate surroundings.

The open-ended nature of the challenge - the programme-makers do not know how much useful footage will be gathered - is what the producers, KEO Films, believes will distinguish Eden from the BBC’s Castaway 2000 series, which was set on an Outer Hebridies island. Liam Humphreys, Channel 4 by Head of Factual Entertainment, said: “Eden developed partly as a response to a growing malaise amongst the young with traditional political systems.

“It offers a simple insight, what would the world look like if we started again? It promises to be a bold idea, not least because of the scale of the concept but also because as programme makers we have no idea what will happen.”

Channel 4 hopes the series escapes the fate of Utopia, a $50m Fox reality series, which placed 15 men and women in an isolated community and asked them to build their own society. Launched last year, it was axed after two months. A Channel 4 spokesman added: “Eden will challenge everything about modern living, raising questions about what we want from our communities and how this could shape our belief in society as a whole.”

The series echoes the original concept of Big Brother, which was inspired by the 1991 Biosphere 2 experiment in the Arizona desert, in which eight men and women lived inside a glass and steel geodesic dome that sought to replicate the Earth’s environment. Eden is set to play a high-profile role in Channel 4’s 2016 schedule. The broadcasters is seeking to convince the Treasury that proposals to privatise the channel would harm its ability to create innovative new series targeted at younger viewers.