Space Scam

I thought we'd reached the nadir of good taste four or five years ago when Channel 4 aired a game show where homeless people could win their dream home. Then there was Joe Millionaire, but at least that was from America... Now comes Space Cadets. It's a reality show where contestants train to be astronauts and are sent into space. Except they're not: they're told they're on a space station (with gravity generators!) but they're really in an aircraft hangar on the outskirts of Ipswich. Three of the six contestants are actors helping to keep up the illusion.



Ho ho ho and all that but I don't like it. I know I'm a moralistic bore and anyone seeking their fifteen minutes of fame badly enough to expose themselves so completely on national television probably deserves everything that's coming to them but there's something cruel about laughing at people being taken for a ride that doesn't translate into entertainment for me. Maybe the gamer in me is protesting that they agreed to play one game but are actually being "scored" on criteria they know nothing about. The Matrix, The Truman Show and that Seventies movie I can never remember the name of where they faked the moon landing film footage in a Hollywood studio are all clear influences on Space Cadets.

I watched fifteen minutes on Tuesday and it seemed fake, but not like I was expecting... The people I was watching it with had seen it before and knew which were the actors but I saw on-camera interviews with most of the astronauts and couldn't tell who was being genuine. They showed highlights of the launch and it went wrong twice: the simulator shook on cue but there was no sound, then they counted down again and it happened again. So the astronauts are looking confused but, to be fair, they've never been into space before so they don't have a frame of reference. One of the two pilots (both actors, I'm told) tries to cover for the silent shaking by saying they're taxiing from the hangar, which would've been a good cover if they hadn't supposedly tried blasting off once already! Later that day (after they'd found the play button on the tape deck) another said hearing the take-off was "like hearing a rocket engine in a film, yeah? Only LOUDER."

And we're supposed to buy all this? I wasn't convinced. If you want a conspiracy theory then it's that the whole thing is staged and the joke is really on us. Imagine our faces when we find out! I just don't think you can fool three people about something so stupendous 100% of the time for two weeks, and scripting fourteen 25-minute episodes is a perfectly reasonable thing to ask of a production team.

The reality show format's been hackneyed for years already and I think someone at Channel 4 deciced it was time for the network that brought Big Brother to Britain in the first place to start innovating again. Are you telling me that no-one hearing the pitch for Space Cadets in a development meeting ever suggested just faking the whole thing? I thought of it in fifteen minutes and I don't even work there. They've done it before too, but it wasn't publicised like this... The game show I mentioned at the start with the dream home? Actually a stunt designed to highlight Britain's homeless problem in an unusual and effective way. True.

The final episode of Space Cadets airs this weekend.

Update 2005-12-17: I was wrong. (See the comments section.)