“Watching Derren Brown: Apocalypse scares me” is just one of the tweets I found on my twitter feed this time last week. But why are we so scared and interested in this show? Is it because, as some would have you believe, the apocalypse is coming on December 21st of this year? The program certainly has apt timing in this respect, although it must be noted that many have discredited this theory of the end of the world by claiming that the Mayans didn’t account for leap years so their calendar was in fact completely different from 21st century time structures. Perhaps we enjoy a certain edgy bravado in thinking along the lines of, as mentioned in the first episode by Steve our ‘victim’ in the show, that “it’s all a load of rubbish”. But why are we so interested when a new theory of the end of the world arises, when we’ve already surpassed so many apocalypse theories before this point; need I mention the Millennium Bug?
In our world we have everything we want at our fingertips and on demand: money, entertainment, food, contact with friends and family at the press of a button and the thing we fear most of all is for all this ease of life to be taken away. This programme makes us look at the bigger picture and forces us to consider what we would do if the modern commodities that we take for granted were taken away from us, and we were forced to revert back to basic instincts of survival.
Personally I must admit I am the type of person who complains about WiFi being down, or by the power being out. But this programme has made me think about what I would do if my entire world was spun into turmoil, a feeling I’m sure it has also provoked in others. We are still fascinated by the concept of apocalypse because it forces us to think about what would happen if our highly individual and often self-centred lives were destroyed, and the potential aftermath of such an event.
In the same way that I see on my Facebook top read news stories that people are fascinated by news that the social networking site may be hacked on Monday and we will all lose our pictures, ‘friends’ and, horror of horrors, our progress on Farmville, programs such as Derren Brown’s Apocalypse hold a morbid fascination for us as we watch an intense ‘what if’ scenario played out before our eyes with terrifying effects.
The apocalypse is an extreme version of disruption to the comfortable and inane routine of our luxurious lives, and this is ultimately why we so many of us are probably tuned in to the second part of the program tonight. Sitting in the comfort of our living rooms, in front of plasma TVs, the world of the apocalypse may seem a distant nightmare, and so it probably is. Conceptualising the ‘end of the world’ may seem unrealistic and unnecessary, a bit of scare-factor in the week around Halloween perhaps, but it can also give us the incentive for a brief moment of self-reflection and re-evaluation of what we should value most in our lives.