Apocalypse review: Channel 4 serves up bread and circuses as the world heads down the dumper
Watching Apocalypse (Channel 4, Sun, 9pm) you couldn't help thinking that if the brains behind all C4’s “social experiments” actually turned their minds to something useful, many of the problems facing the world today could be solved.
And yet, here we are, with all these boffins putting their little grey cells to use by seeing how people might react when they're dropped into an abandoned town with no food, no water and precious little idea of how to get them.
As anyone who's read Lord of the Flies could tell these galaxy-brained men and women in white coats, nothing good could ever come of this particular scenario.
And really, the only fun comes from guessing which of the participants is doomed to be the voice of reason who comes to a sticky end at the hands of their increasingly feral comrades.
This week's “radical experiment” aims to find out what happens when “16 ordinary men and women must survive for 28 days in a familiar world changed beyond all recognition”.
They are split into two teams and sent into an abandoned town, now used by the US military to practice combat in urban environments – although it looks most like a movie set, complete with an abandoned psychiatric hospital.
Each team, meanwhile, is unaware of the other's existence, which leads to sparks flying when they discover signs that they are not alone.
And, as is always the case with these rigorously scientific TV freak shows, the contestants come from the most unsuitable, self-selected group of “personalities”. People who, in a real world torn apart by an actual apocalypse, you would run screaming from as soon as look at them.
But, let's not forget, this is an experiment, so we get alpha male cattle farmer Scott, who throws a hissy fit when the rest of his team ignore him and wishes them a slow, uncomfortable death from starvation.
Right from the off, he endears himself to the viewer when he tells us “there's great value in old school toughness. There's not enough of it, which is why we're in the mess we're in now”.
Or local councillor Celia, who refuses to give up a battery-powered torch because she is afraid of the dark, at one point claiming that her group asked her to look after it.
And then there's posho Freddie – apparently an 'event emcee' – who is looking to his education to help him through the whole experience.
“I think the apocalypse is kind of like boarding school,” he says, “Just a load of people thrown together under awful circumstances.”
But the most intriguing would-be survivor is Keira, who is either fiendishly clever or incredibly stupid.
A psychologist, according to the on-screen captions, Keira claims that she never knew snowflakes fall as actual snowflakes, in the classic six-sided shapes.
And yet she is canny enough to appeal to Scott's macho id as he attempts to break into a convenience store in the search for food, standing back to cheer him on while gasping at his tattoos. And when 'content creator' Scott karate chops a bookshelf apart, she tells him admiringly, “Gosh, you're so strong”.
Influenced by the cinematic surroundings, so familiar from The Last of Us or The Walking Dead, this first episode is constructed like a movie or TV show, complete with prologue and flashback, shaky-cam shots peering round corners, and a cliffhanger ending.
Which rather undermines the experimental boast at the beginning.
But then, Channel 4 knows what it's doing with these shows, whether it's two appalling people being handcuffed together, to a bunch of appalling people being tempted to spend community money on treats to a couple of appalling people trying to get home from a remote outpost while in the buff.
It's bread and circuses, while all around us the world really does appear to be heading down the dumper.
If only there were some bright people about, who could come up with some solutions.