HELLO? BBC? I’ve got an idea for a new reality show. We take a group of normal, well-educated people. No, obviously not celebrities! We dump them in a hostile environment with savage inhabitants and then present them with challenges which nothing in their training has prepared them for.
What’s that? It’s been done before? No, listen. Everything about this really is real. And did I mention that it’s very cheap?
Here’s how it works. The contestants will be real teachers with real mortgages and car loans. That will make it easy to pile on the humiliating ordeals without them being able to give up too easily. If they do they will have to resign and lose their job. The last one to crack will be given early retirement and an enhanced pension.
We will film it in a real school - we have looked at several locations and are spoilt for choice, they are all so disgusting. That’s the hostile environment sorted. The savage inhabitants are the pupils. And we won’t need a production team to set the challenges: the pupils will do it. The average class of 15-year-olds could come up with much more terrifying ordeals than sticking your head in a bucket of eels.
However, our pilot programme showed the teachers are proving much tougher than the celebs in all those other reality progs. No matter how odd the challenges we have set, it seems they have already had to deal with the very same situations in their day-to-day teaching.
We have tried depriving them of heat and electricity, but they just said, “here we go again!”. We deprived them of breaks, denied them food at lunchtime. They hardly seemed to notice.
We made them teach pupils who were known to be violent, high on drugs or severely emotionally disturbed, and still they turned up to take more punishment. We need to think of something that will reduce them to gibbering wrecks - after all, that’s what the viewers want, isn’t it?
