October 2006
Race war in the South Pacific? That’s what Survivor Cook Islands seemed to be offering. I watched the show with some apprehension.
Sure enough, they divided the contestants into four competing "tribes": Caucasian, Afro-American, Asian and Latino. The racial divisions provoked debate in America, with black Apprentice star Omarosa Manigault Stallworth accusing the show of "playing the race card, with no consideration to the long-lasting social implications".
To my eye nothing specifically offensive happened in episode one. Yet the show was subtly disturbing, and I found myself reacting. In the first contest the whites didn’t win (phew). But then the blacks came last (hmmm). Of course I’m a sensitised lefty and maybe most people won’t react the same, but you can see this show is trying to get ratings by messing with our heads, and using race to do it.
Fortunately this loathsome opportunism failed. Ratings dived compared to previous rounds.
Apparently the four "tribes" will collapse into two in a couple of weeks, so maybe the issue will fade, but what remains is a foul precedent. The next unreal "reality" show to play on race might get a lot uglier.
Watching Survivor Cook Islands was disturbing in another way. We were in the Cooks last April and we remember enough to see what fakes these ‘survivors’ are.
They’ve put the Raro team on the main island of Rarotonga, and despite coy camera angles they’re obviously at Muri Beach. It shouldn’t be too hard to survive there – we survived four nights in our little bungalow. Forget catching chickens – there’s a food shop five minutes away.
Around the time we left Rarotonga a charter jumbo arrived with 400 tourists, planning to stage a mass barbecue on Muri Beach. Yeah, it’s real survivor territory.
The Aitu team is on Aitutaki atoll, one of the most beautiful spots on earth, with many nice places to have a beer. And I can guess which islet they’re on: the same one Shipwrecked used. The daily lagoon cruse took us there along with two dozen other tourists. Yeah, really isolated.
That doesn’t matter with entertainment, but they can package fake news this way too, and they do it all the time. TV is a medium of deceit.
There was also something we didn’t see, something nobody seems to be debating. There were Latinos, Afro-Americans, Asians and Caucasians all engrossed in bizarre contests. But in an hour of Survivor Cook Islands we didn’t see one islander. They had disappeared from their own homeland. That’s probably the worst racism of all.