Ian Warden | I am hooked on Alone Australia. Why is it so compelling?

It is strangely, hugely popular. It has become SBS's highest rating program for 2023, to date. The total TV audiences for episodes one and two were 784,000 and 777,000 respectively.

But what if those of us who, rapt, are watching it (and this columnist owns up to being one of the enraptured) are watching a kind of pornography, a sort of survivor porn?

What if it is an entertainment that one's personality's refined Dr Jekyll instinctively turns away from (just as, appalled by it, he never watches Married At First Sight) but that one's personality's degenerate Mr Hyde relishes?

Alone Australia is a reality survivor show in which at first 10 supposedly resourceful outdoorsy Australians (at the time of writing now reduced to six, four having succumbed to mental and physical miseries) have been planted, each utterly alone, in remote Tasmanian places.

The original Intrepid Ten were installed (but then all but abandoned albeit only a life-preserving phone call from rescue) in Tasmania's hellishly uninhabitable south-west (uninhabitable unless one is an eel or a fungus). Almost every day there is a wretchedly wet and rainy day.

It is so unusual for me to be this besotted with a TV program that I am suspicious of my motives in bewitchedly watching Alone Australia, suspecting that it is my flawed Mr Hyde that is such a fan of it.

My suspicion has to do with the strong possibility that the allure of the show for our Mr and Ms Hydes is that we enjoy watching the participants falling apart as loneliness, hunger and 50 shades of wretchedness gnaw at them.

And perhaps the obscenity of it all is deepened by the way the nation watches, in its warm houses from its plush couches with its chums and dogs and with its buckets of McNuggets in its laps, while the loneliness-racked contestants freeze, suffer and starve.

If I am right about this then those of us consumed by Alone Australia are watching an entertainment that is appealing to our cruel and callous sides.

Perhaps it is appealing to a side of us that in other times would have seen us foxtrot along to the Colosseum to enjoy the lethal torments of men and beasts, that in Shakespeare's London would have seen us as part of a rude boys' big day out, going for a jolly time at the bear-baiting before going on to Globe for Will's latest bawdy and bloody play.

My Mr Hyde especially enjoyed the early episodes of Alone Australia in which some humiliated contestants, tortured and horrified by their plights and/or suffering extra misfortunes, had to beg for rescue. My Hyde (and, I suspect, the other 780,000 Hydes watching) takes pleasure in these poor souls' humiliations, in the dashings of their hopes, a major one of which has been the $250,000 prize for being the contestant to stay the longest in these soggy and platypus-infested hells.

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During last Wednesday's episode four my Dr Jekyll (a warm-hearted Christian whose preferred entertainments are the ballet and the opera) looked on in moral horror as my Mr Hyde, of course an atheist and plainly brutalised now by the series, began to openly rejoice at the misfortunes of Michael, an evangelically Christian contestant. Michael was badly lost (Satan had hidden Michael's compass) and remote Tasmania's uniquely dark darkness was closing in.

Michael had earlier bragged that with God on his side he was going to find being alone in the wilderness a breeze, a piece of cake. He sounded, irritatingly, as if his inspiration was going to be Jesus himself who as reliably reported in the Bible (see Matthew 4:1-11) survives 40 days and 40 nights in a wilderness (albeit a dry, desert one, from the sound of it not so vile as Tasmania's sodden and freezing south-west wilderness).

Jesus overcomes his wilderness ordeal with the assistance of angels and in his Christian cockiness Michael sounded as if he was sure that he, too, as a true believer, would be entitled to angelic assistance in keeping going.

And so my brutalised Hyde, who had prayed (in his atheistic way) for Michael to stay lost and despairing and perhaps to be eaten by wild things that come out at night in Tasmania was bitterly disappointed when Michael after all (perhaps with the assistance of angels, although we got no glimpses of them) found his compass and found his way and so stayed to live another day, another episode.

Upon reflection my unchristian callousness in this, in wanting Michael to fail and even to be fatally mauled by Tasmanian devils startled and alarmed me.

When anything in our lives brutalises us, things like, say, going to the bear-baiting, watching televised question time from the House of Representatives, watching Married At First Sight or engaging open-mindedly with Peter Dutton's malignant case for saying 'No' to the Voice, we should try to resist and shun that thing.

And so if willpower permits (although I have a shameful history of being able to resist everything except temptation) I will stop watching Alone Australia now and turn to the ballet.

I have just been to The Australian Ballet's production of Don Quixote in which one's blameless Dr Jekyll is nourished by a tale in which love triumphs, everyone keeps dry and warm and no-one is driven half-mad by loneliness and hunger and (for Don Quixote is set in hospitable Spain) by Tasmania at its worst.