Lord of the ratings

Now, I am as much a fan of reality television as the next man, but there are limits. It’s one thing to take inspiration from Golding’s Lord of the Flies – as all reality shows do – and quite another to try to recreate that masterpiece, as Variety reveals CBS now proposes to do. The idea is apparently to take forty children aged 8 to 15 off to ghost town (rather than an island) and let them start from scratch. Now you have to be a bit weird to want to watch children returning to the Hobbesian state of nature, but my experience as a parent suggests that most of them will have the time of their lives, and the rest will be able to quit when they like. But literary sacrilege is another matter. Poor Golding: he drew inspiration for his novel from observing children as a school master, and now, 53 years after its publication, the idea has been given its final twist.