To watch BBC One’s new reality series Stranded on Honeymoon Island is to be hit with a barrage of questions. To be fair, the main question is, “Weird, I thought I was watching BBC One, but this is clearly an ITV2 show. Does this mean my television is broken?” However, the more pressing one is probably, “Where’s Davina?”
To look on iPlayer, Stranded on Honeymoon Island – in which a bunch of strangers get married to each other and are then shipped off to a remote island with only each other for company – is absolutely a Davina McCall show. There are five figures on the show’s thumbnail, but four of them are pushed back into the middle distance, while McCall looms heavily in the foreground, towering over everyone else like a preternaturally delighted Godzilla. And that would be fine … were McCall actually part of Stranded on Honeymoon Island.
Reader, she is not. Aside from her voiceover – which, for the overwhelming majority of the production process, would have been performed by a researcher – actual flesh and blood McCall is nowhere to be seen. Her physical involvement in the first episode starts two minutes in and ends five minutes in. That’s it. In the next two episodes, she pops up to make highly sporadic blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearances on the contestants’ iPads, reading scripted remarks from thousands of miles away. It is, you have to assume, the cushiest job in all of television.
Or at least it would be, were it not for Elizabeth Hurley’s presence on Channel 4’s The Inheritance. Hurley is nominally the host of this vaguely Traitorseque gameshow, but – and this must be the reason why she agreed to turn up – she is dead. Despite being the main draw of the show, her role involves appearing in exceptionally brief videos in fancy dresses while sitting on an array of suffocatingly plush sofas, and literally not a single thing more than that.
Phoning it in? … Elizabeth Hurley as The Deceased in The Inheritance. Photograph: Channel 4
What’s going on? Is remote hosting a thing now? Even a couple of years ago, the expectation would have been that McCall would have flown out to the honeymoon islands and delivered pieces to camera, or at least interacted with the contestants for a bit. And, even if Hurley were still playing a dead person, there would have been a stipulation that, at the very least, she would have to lie motionless on the floor with an axe through her head or whatever.
But why bother with all that when you could just book the pair of them for three hours and get them to film brief little clips on a phone? Do McCall and Hurley even know they were involved in these programmes? So far, it does feel like someone tricked them into making a bunch of Cameo videos and tried passing it off as legitimate work.
To make matters worse, Stranded on Honeymoon Island and The Inheritance seem to understand that this is suboptimal. Compare them to The Traitors, where – even if she isn’t there the whole time – Claudia Winkleman sets the tone of the entire show with her presence. The series as a whole is off-kilter and melodramatic, and Winkleman’s devotion to leaning into this mood lifts it immeasurably. Imagine if, during the Round Tables, she was reduced to making a series of preprepared statements via an iPad on a stick. It would be terrible.
Hands on … Claudia Winkleman in The Traitors. Photograph: BBC/Studio Lambert
Without this, production on both shows is reduced to shore up the hosts’ meagre screentime with ungainly reaction shots from the contestants. After McCall wafts out of the room five minutes and 42 seconds into the first episode of Stranded on Honeymoon Island, one of them calls out “Love you!” after her. Similarly, Hurley’s first appearance is bookended by someone cooing, “God, she looks good.” You have to assume that nobody has ever said that to Stephen Mulhern when he’s in the room hosting Deal or No Deal.
If this is a trend, it’s hard to know where it began. You have to wonder if Love Island – where Maya Jama presents, despite having minimal involvement – has set a tone that the rest of television has chosen to follow. Or maybe it’s The Apprentice, where Alan Sugar would sometimes introduce tasks with distracted remote videos rather than a physical appearance. You could even argue that this is simply McCall coming home, since her job as the host of Big Brother 15 years ago essentially required her to sit out the bulk of the show and only turn up for evictions.
Perhaps, however, the origins of this are even older. Readers of a certain vintage might remember the 1991 boardgame Atmosfear, in which the direction of the game was influenced by a figure who barked orders from the accompanying VHS tape, regardless of what was actually being played. Essentially, Elizabeth Hurley on The Inheritance is the 21st-century equivalent of Atmosfear. This isn’t something that any of us should be proud of.