Apocalypse: this end-of-days survival show is an absolute slam dunk

Have you ever wondered how Cormac McCarthy’s wasteland novel The Road could be made into a reality show? No? Well someone who works in TV has, so here we are. Who knows if they experienced a follow-up thought: that the instinct to package the end of the world as entertainment might be the most dystopian aspect of the whole enterprise, but hey. Apocalypse (Sunday 13 September, 9pm, Channel 4) launches this week, and people are buzzing!

It’s a slam dunk for a show, because we’ve all run the thought experiment. If society collapsed, how would you get food and find shelter? Would you hunker down or forge alliances? To what depravities might you stoop without the rule of law? Apocalypse puts this empty talk to the test. Seven strangers are dropped at the edge of an abandoned town. They have no access to phones, light, electricity or infrastructure. They do have access to boarded-up supermarkets, desolate buildings, broken vehicles. How soon until they eat each other?

I’d have loved to see this done with ordinary Joes off the street, like the first series of Big Brother. But we live in a different time, and so each of the volunteers is a “type”. There is inevitably a content creator, a Paralympian, a theatre director and an event emcee, who sounds plummier than nana’s crumble. There is useful testosterone to be found in the form of a diesel mechanic, and a square-bodied Australian hunter with a Crocodile Dundee accent thicker than his biceps. (I think he’s a cattle farmer, though it’s possible he works in Kettle Pharma.)

Naturally, tensions spill over. When the team find live chickens near an abandoned trailer and a can of Spam, they become hysterical with joy. Crocodile Dundee, despairing of their sweetshop mentality, rations everyone to a quarter of a tomato a day. The geeks start muttering about a revolt. Starving and fractious, one positive is at least they’re not alone. On the downside, they’re not alone. Within hours of the contestants realising they are not the only team in the town, tribalism starts to do its thing.

When the Spam is stolen, a full-scale battle is declared, and teams tool up with baseball bats. Resource scarcity does this. Some contestants go three or four days without eating. Even before things get that bad, anxiety is abnormally high. “It’s been 45 minutes, and tanks are running low,” gasps Kiera, a psychologist and self-identified princess. She is attempting to prise the boards off a food mart within one hour of arriving in the town, and I’ve never related to anything harder.

The show Hunted had us all imagining how we would go on the lam, evading the attention of the surveillance state. Apocalypse picks up the baton, imagining a world with no state whatsoever. It’s an omnipresent dread, thanks to climate crisis, global instability and AI-induced job despair. There have been countless wilderness survival shows, but none in an urban setting. This feels close to home.

Here’s my hot take: I reckon most people think that when the apocalypse comes, they will secretly be good at it. They imagine finding high ground, teaming up with a doctor, foraging nuts from Tesco. Maybe they’ll repopulate the Earth with Dannii Minogue or something. Pure fantasy. As one mate cruelly framed my chances: “Your glasses will break on the first day, and then you’ll be screwed.” Joke’s on him; I never thought I’d be good. I panic when my phone drops to 4G. If the end of days comes, I will simply vomit and turn to the wall, well before my spectacles betray me.

Apocalypse will probably be huge. I found watching it depressing, because the mirror it holds up is not a flattering one. Loudmouths take charge, people steal and lie, dehumanise each other, thirst for violence. I’m sure the production has guardrails against how far they’ll go, and what they’ll show – I know the chickens’ chances don’t look good – but that’s not even the point. It’s a bleak view of us, the only certainty being that human nature will out. Maybe we’re all selfish when we’re lying in a hole in the ground. Cormac McCarthy would dig it.