Have you ever wondered how Cormac McCarthy’s wasteland novel The Road could be made into a reality show? Well someone who works in TV has, so here we are. Who knows if they experienced a follow-up thought: that the instinct to package the end of the world as entertainment might be the most dystopian aspect of the whole enterprise, but hey.
Apocalypse (Sunday 13 September, 9pm, Channel 4) launches this week, and people are buzzing! It’s a slam dunk for a show, because we’ve all run the thought experiment. If society collapsed, how would you get food and find shelter?
Would you hunker down or forge alliances? To what depravities might you stoop without the rule of law? Apocalypse puts this empty talk to the test.
Seven strangers are dropped at the edge of an abandoned town. They have no access to phones, light, electricity or infrastructure. They do have access to boarded-up supermarkets, desolate buildings, broken vehicles.
How soon until they eat each other? I’d have loved to see this done with ordinary Joes off the street, like the first series of Big Brother. But we live in a different time, and so each of the volunteers is a “type”.
There is inevitably a content creator, a Paralympian, a theatre director and an event emcee, who sounds plummier than nana’s crumble. There is useful testosterone to be found in the form of a diesel mechanic, and a square-bodied Australian hunter with a Crocodile Dundee accent thicker than his biceps. (I think he’s a cattle farmer, though it’s possible he works in Kettle Pharma.) Naturally, tensions spill over. When the team find live chickens near an abandoned trailer and a can of Spam, they become hysterical with joy.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
