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Crash landing … Johnny Vaughan presenting 2005’s Space Cadets.
Crash landing … Johnny Vaughan presenting 2005’s Space Cadets. Photograph: Channel 4
Crash landing … Johnny Vaughan presenting 2005’s Space Cadets. Photograph: Channel 4

After Eden: the other reality TV shows that nobody watched

This article is more than 7 years old

Channel 4’s survival show Eden went off the air without telling its stars – but it’s just the latest in a series of embarrassing reality TV flops, featuring fake astronauts and an orangutan tug-of-war

The fate of Channel 4’s Eden is perhaps the funniest thing to ever happen in television history. In short, the channel sent a handful of strangers to the Scottish Highlands to build a new society. Nobody watched, so the channel stopped broadcasting new episodes. But they didn’t tell the contestants, who continued to scrape and fight and break their teeth on chicken feed for seven whole months in the mistaken belief that they were slowly becoming household names.

Eden feels like the perfect allegory for our self-obsessed times. After all, if you’re forcing yourself to eat rock-hard farm grit for sustenance and nobody’s watching, are you even really doing it? However, Eden isn’t the only dismal failure in the history of reality TV: these shows all faced a similar fate.

Shattered, Channel 4 (2004)

Even though Channel 5’s Touch the Truck deserved to be the first and last word in pointless endurance challenges, Channel 4 nevertheless tried to up the ante with Shattered, a show in which people attempted to stay awake for a week. Taking place inside a budget Big Brother house, Shattered was must-see television for anyone who enjoyed watching people too tired to do anything other than sit around and listlessly blink for hours at a time. The show tanked, with the final being watched by 300,000 fewer people than the previous night’s episode.

Space Cadets, Channel 4 (2005)

This was a high-concept, 10-episode reality show in which members of the public were – and this is true – duped into thinking they were astronauts. This trick required vast amounts of resources and a reported budget of almost £5m. That money was necessary, because if any contestants had realised that they weren’t actually in space, the show would ultimately be over. The contestants very quickly realised that they weren’t actually in space, the show was over and 600,000 people stopped watching.

There’s Something About Miriam, Sky (2004)

Filed under Shows That Would Never Get Made in 2017 comes There’s Something About Miriam, a Bachelorette-style dating show in which several men vied for the affections of pretty Mexican Miriam Rivera. However, unknown to them, Miriam was actually a pre-op transgender woman. The show had been set to air in 2003, but was held back a year after the male contestants sued the production company for conspiracy to commit sexual assault, defamation, breach of contract and personal injury in the form of psychological and emotional damage.

Who’s Your Daddy?, Fox (2005)

Possibly the cruellest reality show ever committed to tape, Who’s Your Daddy? began as a six-part series in which a woman was put into a room with 25 older men and asked to guess which of them was her real estranged biological father. If she guessed correctly, she won $100,000. If she didn’t, the actor she picked as her father would win the money. To underline how monstrous this is, look at the video above. A tearful woman asks a man why he gave her up. He cries, tells her that she was conceived in a moment of love and confesses that not a day has passed where he hasn’t thought of her. Except that man is an actor. He’s the one who uploaded the video to YouTube, along with the description: “My performance on this Fox Reality series almost won me $100,000.” Gruesome. So gruesome, in fact, that Fox pulled five of the six episodes before they’d aired.

Man v Beast, ITV (2003)

This video is from a US series called Man v Beast, in which humans took part in challenges against presumably unwilling animals. One challenge involved a sumo wrestler having a tug-of-war with an orangutan, for example. Another saw 44 dwarves attempt to pull an aeroplane further than an elephant could. Despite being incredibly controversial, ITV commissioned a six-part British version, to be presented by John Fashanu. However, two days before it was set to premiere, ITV pulled the entire series after Dame Judi Dench said it left her “horrified”.

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