I think I'd hate life in a modern-day 'Eden'

A forthcoming show on Channel 4, Eden, will put 20 people on a desolate island in the northern hemisphere, and film them as they try to build a utopian society. I wish them all the best, the contestants, or survival experts, or whatever it is they want to be called. And I don’t think you count as totally human if there isn’t a small part of you (it can be tiny) that thinks it might just be worth sacking everything off and joining in.

What if it works? What if they knock it right out the park? What if it has worked before, even, and out in the Philippines there live the remnants of Shipwrecked: Series 6 who actually waved the TV crews off from the shore and, shedding their identities as glamour models and professional wind-up merchants, now pass the years mating and building canoes, their out-of-office emails still pinging back an excited guide to the TV schedules of 2008?

OK, it hasn’t worked before. We know that. The best indication that there is a “bad seed” in humanity comes from replanting modern people in supposedly paradisial surroundings. You get about two minutes of everyone admiring the sunset, before Kelly from Stoke is calling Alex a saucy pig for looking down her bikini top, and the bold 50-year-old who wanted a change of scene realises to his horror – on a raft in the middle of the Indian ocean – that all those fishing magazines haven’t actually taught him how to fish. Watch enough of these shows and you start to think there’s very good reason that we’ve evolved to live alone in tiny apartments. What’s remarkable is that our hunter-gathering ancestors resisted the temptation to club each other to death when they had the chance.

Perhaps the Eden crew will fare a little better. Each of the 20 volunteers must be “highly-skilled”, in a discipline like engineering, or botany. They will also have to be highly-skilled, one assumes, in putting up with political chuntering, if the press release is anything to go by. The show is aimed at those who share the “growing malaise amongst the young with traditional political systems.” So not only will you be freezing your tits off in the Outer Hebrides, you’ll have to do it while some absolute knucklehead is lecturing you about paradigms and Che Guevara.

Which brings us to Ben Fogle. “In the developed world,” said the TV star of Castaway 2000 fame this week, “we’ve tried to close the door on the wilderness... but we’ve ended up dominated by a technology-driven 24-hour lifestyle.” I struggle with this sort of stuff. If you ask me, Fogle really only sums up the point of doors, which is more or less exactly to close on the wilderness. Perhaps he can make a fire by rubbing two sticks together, but if you left me and him in a field, and he had his two sticks, and I had an iPhone, we’d soon see who survived the longest. (“Hello Uber? Yes, taxi for one please”.) Eden can wait. I’ve got a dishwasher, 300 megabit broadband and a clean pair of Nike trainers. I’ll see you all in hell.