From what I have heard, it will be crucial that they believe the gravity nonsense. As the programme makers tell it, the contestants were selected based on their ignorance and credulity - anyone who expressed the first shred of interest or knowledge about space flight was immediately excluded - and the actors are in there to keep them believing it.
Hmmm. :dubious:
- The entire world knows the participants have been chosen cos they’re thick.
- A number of “TV physiologists” have already declared they wouldn’t touch it with a barge-pole. Thick people have feelings too.
- The participants are being deceived at every step.
- The participants didn’t sign up to any of this.
- Anything the participants did sign could easily be challenged in court as being a misrepresentation.
-Johnny Vaughan
Morally questionable. Legally dubious. Johnny bloody Vaughan. Enough said.
That worked in Doctor Who.
Well now. The second episode just finished. And it’s all very convincing. Lots of shouty Russians, though the supposedly expatriate British Royal Air Force officer does seem to have a lot of problem with Russion pronunciation (Ser-ge-EYE, and nas-tro-VOY-a).
The question of zero-G was addressed and glossed over with words to the effect of “you’ll achieve an altitude of 200 kilometres (124 miles), which is high enough to reach orbit, but still within the earth’s gravitational field” - neither of which statement is factually incorrect, but very misleading all the same - and the contestants bought it.
BUT, and this is a huge but, one of the production credits is Zeppotron.
Zeppotron is the brainchild of Charlie Brooker.
Brooker is a man who despises television, and in particularl ‘reality TV’, and the gullible idiots who watch it. This is exemplified by his ‘TV Go Home’ spoof. [For some reason, the tvgohome.com URL is now taken over by something by ‘Spam Stomp’, but here are some archive pages of his satirical TV guide for illustration purposes.]
Since seeing the reference to Zeppotron, I am now as cynical as I can possibly be about this without being accused of being a bona fide conspiracy theorist. Mark my words, this entire thing is bollocks, and we are the dupes.
It worked in the States for [url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0377024/]“The Joe Schmo Show”
[/quote]
, so well that there was even a “Joe Schmo 2”. It didn’t take much watching to stop laughing and start to feel sorry for the chump, though.
Here’s hoping BBC America shows “Space Cadets” anyway, though. Even if the whole cast is in on it, it’s still got to be funny.
Goodness, the thot plickens [April 15, 2005]:
My bold.
So Zeppotron worked with Chris Morris on Nathan Barley, launched on Feb 11th this year. And announced another show recently, though no futher info has been forthcoming as far as I know, but is now involved in Space Cadets.
All bets are off, as far as I’m concerned.
I don’t know, for somebody who hates TV Charlie Brooker’s making an awful lot of it. The RAF guy was not very convincing, too obviously an actor with his comedy moustache and fake-looking uniform, but I can imagine that if I were actually there I would be taken in.
I was concerned that the producers would give the game away by overlooking some small but important detail, like “Made in Derby” stamped on a lightswitch or something, but it sounds like they have been pretty careful.
I watched a very small part of the show tonight, and one thing that jumped out at me was that the installation they’re at is apparently called the Space Tourism Agency of Russia. Shouldn’t it have a Russian name?
It’s supposed to be a commercial organisation. It wouldn’t surprise me at all for such an organisation to use an English acronym. I don’t think many of their space tourist customers would be Russian.
Not if they’re marketing it, as they claim to be, to American billionaires.
The contestants have been told that it will be a SpaceShipOne type launch from a runway, so quite a gentle affair.
I don’t know how BBC America works that well but I would guess that seeing as the show is on Channel 4 (not part of the BBC) it would be unlikely to be broadcast on BBC America.
If you ask me they have been a little too careful in their preperation of the supposed Russian training base. It seems like everything in the building is screaming “I’m from Russia!!” with no plain items that could be neutral. Right down to the drinking mugs that have portraits of Vladimir Putin on them, if you went to, for example, NASA for such a project you wouldn’t expect to find mugs with Dubyas ugly mug plastered on the side. In particular the commander’s office is unconvincing in it’s decoration, the flight seat instead of an office chair made me laugh in particular.
Still, with the collective I.Q. of a piece of toast I doubt the contestants will rumble the setup. People only see what they want to see, if the contestants want to believe they are going into space then they will, regardless of all the information to the contrary.
I completely see the logic (in fact this is among the range of things I have suspected myself about the show), but wouldn’t it just fall flat that way? Oh, so they’re all stooges, right. Ha.
Unless the punchline perpetrated upon us is that the final candidate does actually get flown to Russia and… naah.
At the moment, if anything isn’t ringing true, it’s the complexity and expense of the setup, but I might go back on that when I see more of the facility.
I’ve got a suspicion that some of those items aren’t actually in use, but it’s footage created for use by the production company when cutting between scenes. Especially the mug with Lenin on it (you didn’t mistake him for Putin, did you? 
)
If your target audience is the kind of person that thought Top Gun was a realistic film, it seems about right.
The fact that it’s gone to air shows that the contestants haven’t rumbled at this point (or at least if some have rumbled, they’re playing along, which the producers have said they’re happy to do).
And isn’t it slightly interesting that we’re calling them contestants, when none of them know that there’s cash prizes for those that don’t spot the hoax?
The big expense so far has been the plane & helicopter to bring them into the place. All of the buildings you’ve seen are real, and I’ve seen similar ones from public paths. Keep them cooped up and occupied, and you don’t need too much of the fancy outdoor effects. It also occured to me that strategically-positioned floodlights makes a lot of things invisible.
Yeah, a bunch of real smegheads.
Not necessarily. Despite the name, I’ve noted that a large hunk of the content comes from the British commercial networks.
What I mean is that I see less evidence of the declared expense than I expected to. I dunno, it’s a subtle thing.
So do they win something or are people “voted off the station” or anything?
Come to think of it, a mock soyuez capsule dropped out of a chopper into the North Sea with the voted off contestant inside would be pretty darn funny. Probably too dangerous or expensive though.
Yes; in tonight’s show, one of the contestants will be eliminated from the running. I’m kind of hoping they’ll just bus the loser off the base and drop him/her in Ipswich; it would be great to see the precise moment that realisation dawns.
There was mention last night that they will whittle down to 4 astronauts (they should have said cosmonauts for authenticity); at the moment, I’m assuming this means one contestant and the three stooges; that way there would only be one grand prizewinner, which seems consistent with other reality shows.
If they do this, the potential for mindf*cking the remaining contestant is going to be massive, with three hired-in actors to manipulate him/her.