25 years ago the UK’s first ever fish-out-of-water reality TV show launched. Castaway 2000 stranded dozens of people on a remote Scottish island and inspired shows like Big Brother. The show had astonishing scope. By Adam Bloodworth, with photos by Simon Roberts
It was a sunny autumn day in 1998 when TV producer Chris Kelly arrived at the BBC Television Centre armed with an idea. He had a meeting booked with Peter Salmon, co-founder of Sport Relief and the Controller of BBC1. “As the new millennium beckoned, we discussed what we’d do differently if we had the chance to start all over again,” Kelly tells me. The conversation went well: just over 12 months later, they were filming a show that birthed a new era of reality TV.
“I hate the phrase ‘reality television’, but I’ll use it,” says Kelly, speaking on the 25th anniversary of Castaway 2000, the controversial, once-in-a-lifetime reality show that inspired the likes of Big Brother and I’m A Celebrity.
The BBC show, which stranded 36 strangers on a remote island in the Outer Hebrides and made them fend for themselves, was the first of its kind. In the 1990s, the en vogue style of reality TV had been fly-on-the-wall documentaries following cabin crews around airports and learner drivers with their long-suffering instructors. Taking a different tack, Castaway 2000 was the first to show ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Big Brother put a load of strangers in a house together and waited to see what happened, but this Hebridean show – launched three months earlier – thought dumping strangers on a remote island would be the better gambit. It wouldn’t be long before celebrities would go into the jungle, waved off by Ant and Dec. But first, there was Castaway 2000.
The show was astonishing in its scope. The castaways spent an entire year living on the Scottish island of Taransay. There was no technology, except for one CD player, and visitors were banned. The idea was that the castaways lived self-sufficiently, killing their own livestock and growing their own vegetables. One participant, Tanya, was tasked with filming, so TV crews didn’t ruin the experiment, although additional footage was shot by a production team who visited sporadically.
There were explosive bust-ups, which became some of the biggest tabloid stories of 2000. In 2010, one of the castaways, Ron Copsey, wrote a piece for the Guardian entitled “How Castaway ruined my life.” Another contestant was Ben Fogle, who had formerly served as photo editor for Tatler.
The UK’s first fish-out-of-water reality TV show: The cast of Castaway 2000 on the island of Taransay
I was fascinated that these people had upended their lives for an entire year, but also that the show has been largely forgotten. So I got in touch with a number of the old castaways, producer Chris Kelly, the psychologist who supported the islanders, the man who wrote the official book and the guy who photographed the show, many of whom are still working in the TV industry.
Their accounts differ dramatically. While some describe a fairly harmonious experience, others say the castaways were at each others’ throats. One thing for certain is that Chris Kelly and co-producers Jeremy Mills and Colin Cameron knew this would make unrivalled TV. “We came away from that meeting giddy with excitement,” says Kelly. “Part of us thought, ‘Shit, we’re gonna have to make this now’. You’ve gotta be careful what you wish for sometimes. If you say you’ll put a man on the moon, you’ve got to do it. And if you say we’re going to create a microcosm of society for a year…”
What’s interesting isn’t so much the brawls – they’re easy to manufacture and totally inevitable – but how earnest the project seemed. “I don’t think anyone now would do something that had the purest intentions of social experiment,” says Kelly.
Read more: The voice of Celebrity Big Brother: ‘We can all be fake – I’m doing it now!’
Watching old clips of the show on YouTube, I believe him. The show featured scrappy, handheld camerawork, and spent long periods of time with people performing fairly ordinary tasks, going about their lives on the island. It would be a hard sell to commissioners today. More intriguing is what the programme says about the way people envisioned their 21st century lives. “It’s hard to imagine how people were feeling at the turn of the millennium, but there was a lot of retrospection about whether we were living the right way,” remembers Kelly. Cynthia McVey, the psychologist who worked with the contestants, agrees that the scope of the show feels even more impressive with the passing of time. “When I look back, it was extraordinary,” she says. “Sometimes I think people have forgotten how extraordinary this community of people turned out to be.”
Butcher Colin was one of 36 islanders
Castaway 2000 launched in the same year as two similar ‘fish-out-of-water’ reality TV shows. Survivor and Big Brother UK both premiered in 2000, and according to Dr Rebecca Trelease, reality television lecturer at AUT University, Big Brother’s funding and Channel 4 timeslot “could be attributed to the success of Castaway 2000.” She believes it’s a similar story for Survivor, which launched on a primetime slot on CBS in America. Castaway 2000 was also the first show to adopt the diary room format, before Channel 4 made it famous. “There was a movement, clearly,” agrees Kelly. “People were looking to make observational documentaries on people’s lives. ‘Let’s put people in a different situation,’ was very much new-millennial thinking in TV. That went down the road that ended up saying, ‘Let’s create a scripted reality world’, which led to Essex and Chelsea, and these other shows.”
But on Castaway 2000, there was no winner, no tasks or challenges, no kangaroo testicle eating, no audience vote-offs and no prize money. No crowds of screaming fans stood outside waving placards. All that noise would distract from the more fascinating but far slower work of watching a new population come together over 12 months. The backdrop was the beautiful island of Taransay, three kilometres across the water from the Isle of Harris, famous as the home of Harris Tweed. Taransay is just under 15 kilometres squared, easy enough to get around on foot, and during filming the island was home to 700 sheep, many of which became lamb rump cooked over flame. The combined result of overgrazing and the harsh climate means there is just one tree.
Photographer Simon Roberts describes the rain coming down sideways “like javelins” and McVey remembers the wild weather leaving her stranded on Taransay long after her work was done. “You get cut off,” she shudders. “Once I was stuck out there for three or four days.” These days, the island is privately owned by Adam and Cathra Kelliher and is uninhabited, although they welcome guests to visit on day-boats from Harris. “The majority of British visitors know the show,” says Adam Kelliher. “Many are keen to see the sites immortalised on film.” They may be disappointed if they’re hoping to swat up on attractions though: all that remains is one “crumbling hydro system and the grave of a dog that died while they were on the island.” But the landscape, carved out of one of the oldest rocks in the world called Lewisian Gneiss and dating back three billion years, cannot be blown away by the relentless gale force winds. “There is a timeless quality to the place,” says Kelliher. “People may pass through, but the eternal island always remains.”
Even more fascinating is that the castaways enjoyed island life so much that they began to “resent the presence of a crew,” remembers psychologist McVey. “Towards the end they almost took possession of the island, even though the BBC was paying for what they were doing.” While at first the plan was that the show would air either late in 2000 or early in 2001, BBC tested some footage earlier in 2000 which was a huge ratings hit, pulling in nine million viewers, so Kelly and his team had to change tack.
A dozen 50-minute episodes aired in 2000, with four in January, another quintet in April and the final four in September. Then a Big Brother-esque series of live daily broadcasts began in December. Roberts, who spent eight weeks on the island photographing the castaways, thinks that producers intruded on their lives too much which ultimately detracted from the experiment. “Perhaps if they had been allowed to be isolated for the year with remote cameras and confessional boxes, the potential for a more interesting television experiment could have been given a chance,” he says.
Kelly denies that producers did anything “at all” to provoke the much-publicised fights to score higher ratings, recalling that “a lot of the drama was circumstantial.” On the contrary, he says, it was the BBC who requested they capture the bust-ups. “There was still a kind of demand led by the audience, but from the BBC as well, a little bit. You know, ‘Have you got any more of them arguing?’ There were times when I felt, ‘Enough with the arguing! They’re actually getting on now.’”
There were disputes about working hours, about castaways having lie-ins while others were up milking cows, and access to contraband provided by illegal visitors from off-island. As Kelliher puts it: “A lot went on that wasn’t broadcast!” The relentless 100mph winds went on for weeks and meant you couldn’t stand up if you went outside, no doubt further quickening tempers. “People were falling out over whether they should have a drink or a fag,” says Kelly. “It made for some very entertaining viewing.”
All of the castaways I spoke to remembered their experience fondly. “I dream of Taransay still,” says Padraig, who was 27 and working in IT sales when he arrived on the island. One of his favourite memories was successfully hunting a deer. “That was thrilling. The island itself is magnificent, and the pure freedom of it is the kind of thing people dream of.” Jodene was 11 at the time and is also grateful for the formative experience. “If it wasn’t for Castaway 2000, I wouldn’t be who I am today,” she says. “At 11-years-old I knew I was part of something that was socially important.”
Most believe the format will never return. Fragmented audiences watching clips on social media have democratised broadcast content, so much so that “the audience doesn’t need TV professionals, frankly, to deliver them the content they want to find,” says Kelly. McVey thinks the idea wouldn’t appeal to Gen Z, who see reality TV stars from Love Island and would expect a similar experience. Today it would be difficult to find youngsters who would not see it as a way to become a reality television star. “Back then, I would say the majority were there genuinely out of interest.” That’s crucially where it differed from Big Brother, which Kelly describes as “a form of tabloid show. I’m not knocking that very successful format… But ours wasn’t. Ours was more organic.”
But there is a trend for slower television, for shows that respond to the idea that so many of us struggle to focus on anything for longer than a few seconds. There is also a movement to get us away from phones and screens, which is proving commercially successful for travel companies touting ‘off-grid’ experiences in huts in the woods, disconnected from the internet. If people are willing to pay exorbitant sums to live like medieval forest-dwellers by holidaying with companies like Unplugged, then I have hope for another reality TV show as ambitious as Castaway 2000.
It certainly chimed with the contestants, many of whom are still close. Almost half of the original castaways met on Taransay this past August for a reunion, with 15 of them spending a full weekend together reminiscing. “We were very nostalgic,” says Padraig. “And very happy to be there and together in a group again.”
“I don’t feel guilty that we unleashed the beast,” says Kelly, who is humble about what his show achieved: “Nor do I feel like we should be taking any credit. We were just following the stream like everyone else.”