Castaway 2000 dot Org

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What is / was Castaway?

Castaway 2000 was a slightly different kind of reality TV show, as there were no prizes on offer – not unless you count the chance to live on a remote island in the Outer Hebrides for a year as a prize in itself. Billed as a “social experiment”, Castaway left 36 people (said to be a cross section of the British public) on the island of Taransay in January 2000, for an entire year. They had to try to build a community, live off the land and use alternative energy sources.

Perhaps the thing that most people remember about the series was the amount of arguments that the Castaways had between themselves and a lot of the blame for that could possibly lie with the programme makers, for having seemingly selected people who were bound to clash. A homosexual man and a family of devout Seventh Day Adventists, for example! The conflicts came thick and fast, which delighted some viewers but turned just as many off. At the beginning of it’s run of programmes, the show had 8 million viewers, but this dropped to as low as 4 million over the course of the year.

In May 2000, (? I think) Big Brother hit British TV screens and many of the followers of Castaway suddenly became hooked on the Channel 4 alternative. This put the makers of Castaway – Lion TV , and the BBC – in a spin over ratings. Believing the failing to be that viewers wanted to access the daily lives of “contestants”, as they could with BB, they attempted to install webcams on the island, asked the Castaways to talk to people live on the net and started to give out instructions as to what would be good material for video diaries. The Castaways were having none of it, however. Their original agreement had been that the BBC would put out the programmes in 2001, so the rules had already been bent out of shape – going live was something they were just not prepared to tolerate!

In a bid to pep things up and compete with BB, they portrayed Ron Copsey, the gay man, as a baddie, a sort of “Rancid Ron” to compare with “Nasty Nick”. In frustration with the makers of the programme and due to differences with some of the Castaways, Ron quit the island halfway through the project.

They did manage to get the Castaways on TV live in the end, though, beaming several episodes over Christmas and New year straight into the homes of avid viewers…but what a lot of people won’t have realised is that all the live footage was rehearsed beforehand, scheduled in advance – and they even flew in presenter Julia Bradbury to act as a sort of gameshow host. As to the fame of the Castaways, only Ben Fogle, who was heavily featured in the shows, has continued to work in TV, appearing as a regular on The Holiday Show, Countryfile and various others. As he comes from a media family (his mother is sixties film star, Julia Foster and his father is celebrity vet, Bruce Fogle) perhaps that was to be expected, as he has all the contacts to hand!

If you asked the Castaways why they did it, almost all of them would say for the chance to live on the island and be a part of the project. None would ever admit that they did it for fame and fortune, which is lucky, as for the majority of them, it wasn’t forthcoming!

Newspapers still run stories about the Castaways from time to time, but for most, life has returned to normal since the project closed on January 1st, 2001.

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