Satire: Epic voyage plans to put reality back into reality TV

Epic voyage plans to put reality back into reality TV

Trojan Horse Tours principal Major Jeremy Billycock-Smythe has abandoned his foray into private enterprise and announced his latest adventure travel venture in partnership with a new Reality Television program called Row For Your Lives.

"I am going to lead a party on a very special canoe trip across the vast
Pacific Ocean ," Major B.S., as he likes to be called, said at a press
conference yesterday.

"Like the great Polynesian seafarers thousands of years before, we are
going to do it without maps, without compasses and without clean
handkerchiefs.
"Unlike the great Polynesian seafarers thousands of years before, however, our canoe will carry television cameras and our exploits will be beamed by satellite into living rooms all over the world."

Major B.S. said that extensive plans had already been drawn up for the
60-foot canoe, modelled carefully on what the Polynesians probably used.
It will consist of two hulls dug out with stone axes from tree trunks, lashed together with eight crossbeams with coconut fibre.
A deck will be lashed on top of the crossbeams, with a rough shelter made from bark and dry grass.
There will be two masts, with sails woven from coconut or pandanus leaves.
Major B.S. said the canoes would be paddled when there was no wind, and
sailed when there was, in open sea stretches up to 2000 miles, just like
the great Polynesian seafarers who populated the Pacific.

"I am very excited about this project," Major B.S. said. "If has the
potential to be Trojan Travel Tours' biggest success yet."

He didn't say it, but if it succeeds, it will be Trojan Horse Tours only
success yet.

Major B.S., a former British army officer, burst on to the Australian
tourism scene in August last year when Trojan Travel Tours launched its now infamous war-zone adventure tours.
That ended disastrously when his whole tour party was captured on a
Chechynan battlefield.
His other misadventures include:

getting a tour party lost for 15 days in the burning hot, fiercely
hostile Nullabor Plains, during which they captured and ate an animal thought to be extinct;
abandoning party of 12 Americans on Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra after taking their money and promising to whip them into shape for the one of the world's most treacherous ocean-going events, the Sydney to Hobart yacht race;
A stint of six weeks and one day as head of Australian's new Department of Adventure Travel, including a six-week period serving out his notice; and
And most recently, work as a consultant for an international consortium which wanted to buy the whole Pacific Ocean and lease bits of it back.

"In hindsight, the Pacific Island venture was a bit of a mistake, what,"
Major B.S, dressed resplendently in Bermuda shorts, white knee socks and his old Rugby College tie, admitted at the press conference yesterday.

"Oh, I made a tidy little sum as a consultant, but, as it turns out, the
idea was not at all feasible.

"Have you ever looked at a map and tried to work out just how huge the
Pacific Ocean is? Well, I now have, and I can tell you it's BIG. What's
more, you have no idea how unreceptive some countries are when it comes to talk about parting with their EECs.
Yet they were very interested in speaking to us when they thought they were actually going to get something out of it. Ungrateful rabble.

"Still, at least I got to see many areas of the Pacific first hand and learn something about the tremendous voyages of 1000, 2000, 3000 years ago.

"These seafarers were truly amazing, inspiring. They navigated without
instruments, relying on their observations of the ocean and sky and traditional knowledge of the patterns of nature for clues to the direction and location of islands which sometimes they only suspected existed — tiny dots of land in a vast, vast ocean.
"There was always a danger of capsizing in heavy seas, of having sails ripped apart or masts and booms broken by winds.
"The people aboard were exposed to the wind, rain, and sun.
"A stormy night at sea, even in the tropics, can be damn cold.

"Even though I am from good Anglo-Saxon stock myself, I'd like to think I
have inherited some of the Polynesians' spirit. I don't always know where I am going but I am determined to get there, and to take paying tourists with me.
"The fact that I don't have a map or a compass is never any concern to me,"
said Major B.S., uncoiling his 6 foot 2 frame to full length, his handlebar
moustache twitching with obvious excitement.

"I am sure this trip will appeal to many adventurers as the chance of a
lifetime.
"Do you know how many people are born into circumstances that would never offer the opportunity to them to help paddle a canoe across the Pacific Ocean?
"Trojan Horse Tours can now give them that chance."

The idea to marry the epic canoe voyage with a Reality TV program came about during a chance meeting between Major B.S. and an unemployed television producer, Wilfred Dimwit, in a small bar on a Pacific atoll.

"Wilfred was bemoaning how Reality TV had, in fact, become very unreal,"
Major B.S. said.

"I agreed with him. How can you expect viewers to empathise with a bunch of civilised people who have been magically transported to a desert location or a tropical island, or people locked in a house with 24-hour
surveillance? That kind of thing just doesn't happen in real life."

"We got talking about my canoe voyage and he thought it would be a
wonderful idea to film the whole thing and let viewers know exactly how
people react and interact in those conditions — weeks and weeks at sea without seeing land, having to ration raw fish and rainwater and trying to fight off the temptation to rip a coconut leaf off the sails every time one has a runny nose."

Major B.S said it was proposed that cameras powered by solar panels on the mast tops of the canoe would capture all the action and these images would be beamed by satellite back to studios.

He said, however, the finer points of the format of the TV show still had
to be worked out.

"At this stage, we are leaning towards someone being voted off the boat
every time we reach land.

"If we don't sight land for a while, we might just have to push them
overboard and hope the sharks don't get them before the TV production
crew's speedboat can pick them up.
"We will take ever possible precaution to prevent the shark scenario, but,
just in case, we will expect every participant signs an indemnity form and pay up front BEFORE the trip."

©June 13, 2001 John Martin. All Rights Reserved

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