(Okay, so that may not have been the longest clip, but it’s the only one that’d work here. To go see some more clips, you might want to pop over to YouTube or something.)
I’m not really a TV person. I used to be, then reality TV struck. Now it’s all Strictly Come this and I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of there. There’s not a lot on which would appeal to a wider audience. So I hated reality TV.
So I don’t really understand why I liked this. It’s a sort of documentary mixed with reality TV. It’s called Boys and Girls Alone, and it’s a 4-part series where a group of ten boys and ten girls live without parents in their own little communities, with people seeing how they react.
They’re left to roam in their own little village. Choosing where they sleep, what to eat and more importantly who’s in charge. Interestingly on the whole the boys coped better with creating home life than the girls did, who set out to practically alienate the non-cool kids in their group.
They’ve been set tasks these past couple of episodes. Last week they were given £200 to entertain themselves for three days. The girls blew it all on the first day buying lots of food, but the boys kept it back and were rewarded with a fun day out on the third day.
This week, they went out camping. They were given all the camping gear and whatnot, but the girls thought it would be a good idea to hike with suitcases. The boys lumbered Ade – the previous ‘leader’ of the group – with the heavy stuff. Heh. I know how that feels. But yeah, they had to skin rabbits and catch fish to survive, which opened everyone up and they all got along in the end.
At the end of the last episode, the boys and girls met for the first time at a party hosted by the girls. Within the hour, the party was over and the girls were shouting insults at them as they left. However William (or ‘Just Will’), being the youngest and shyest member of the boy’s group, jumped into the party to find love. He found it with a girl called Mandy.
In the final part of the series, the girls move into the boys’ village. From what I saw on the preview, it’s going to be one hell of a scrap fight, but in the middle of it, Will and Mandy get all loved up. Aww. 
If you’re awesome, you can catch up with the previous three episodes online with Channel 4 Catch Up or, if you can get it to work, 4OD. That’ll leave you ready to tackle the final part next Tuesday at 9pm on Channel 4.
As a little side note in addition to this post, it irritates me how the general public can be offended by this show.
When I was doing a bit of research for this blog, I found that everyone’s basically talking about how the show is inhumane and how it should be axed. It apparently harms the psychological wellbeing of the children taking part and fails to intervene with children in obvious distress. It’s totally untrue, and anyone who watched the show would be able to tell you that.
The participants were intensively screened before taking part that they could handle everything that was planned. Every action was carefully monitored and these monitors would intervene whenever things got too out of hand.
The children are essentially learning life skills. Okay, so maybe not all of us need to learn how to skin rabbits, but in reality this is a psychology experiment. There’s no other reason to do it how they’ve done it. The parents have said their kids came out more confident as a result. So what’s the harm?
It’s just people needing to get antsy about something other than some off-the-cuff remark made on the BBC. Pfft, go back fox hunting…
Does this depend on your age?
Matthew is my cousin