Shipwrecked
Contents |
Host
Paul Gittins and Kate Humble (Series 1)
Harriet Saxon (Series 2-3)
Craig Kelly (Voice-over: Battle of the Islands)
Broadcast
RDF Productions for Channel 4, 9 January 2000 to 20 December 2001 (57 episodes in 3 series)
as Battle of the Islands, 8 January 2006 to 10 May 2009 (86 episodes in 4 series)
Synopsis
In its original incarnation, Shipwrecked was a survival challenge; sixteen young people were left on a South Pacific island, and challenged to live on their wits and concealed supplies for three months. This experiment - which had no prize, or clear winner - ran for three series between 2000 and 2001, but was not renewed when Channel 4's soap opera Hollyoaks expanded to five episodes per week.
The show that returned in 2006 bore the same title as its predecessor, and was made by the same company, but everything else had changed. In an update of the old "social experiment" format, a bunch of 18 to 24-year-olds are split into two tribes, each with its own island. Each week, a new person arrives and the tribes must compete to convince the newcomer to join them. The tribe with the most members at the end wins. A second series in 2007 was promoted from Sunday lunchtime to early evenings, and included a viewer phone-in.
Trivia
One of the contestants in the late 2001 series was Jeff Brazier, who would find future fame as the husband of Jade Goody.
The islands were re-used during 2006 as the location for a US series of Survivor.
