Tribewanted: Vorovoro

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Monday, 21 January 2008

Ben Keen’s efforts to create an eco village on Vorovoro, an island off the coast of Fiji using a social networking website are commendable. It’s a fascinating project and the focus of BBC2 documentary series Paradise or Bust which started tonight. This series follows the first year of the project and tells of the personal journeys, challenges and logistical complexities of creating the eco village. The project leaders are all suitably telegenic and the tribe members all perfectly wacky (read varied) but that’s more down to luck than casting.

I love this idea for so many reasons. The main one is that it’s a cracking example of good television that hasn’t been dreamt up by a load of overpayed and uncreative spods, but people with a shared vision, a set of real objectives and an understanding of the power of the internet.

OK, so on first watch it seems a bit ‘hideously middle class’ (as Dykie liked to say) and a little bit bonkers, but it’s a lot more entertaining than the second series of Castaway and other ‘reality’ formats like the now dead and buried Big Brother and, dare I say it, Celebrity Love Island. In fact, to compare it to such formats is an insult to the project. For this is a real example of the cameras following an ‘event’ rather than creating a reality in studio lab conditions. I’ll be following with interest and hope that TV bosses get the message that the pool of creativity on the internet is lapping at their doors, rather than behind them. It’s also a much deeper pool of talent than they can ever imagine.

It’s just occurred to me that the project has echos of Danny Wallace’s brilliant book How To Start Your Own Country? Weird then that Danny presented the second series of the BBC’s Castaway. Another thought…I wonder if the TV cameras would have followed if this ambitious project was taking place in Africa?