Splendid isolation

Mud huts. The latest example of the "reality TV" genre, we notice, is a south-London family of five living in a mud hut in Swaziland for three months. What a long way we have come since the Wilkins family of Reading threw open their walls, lives and foibles to a fly in 1974.

Mud huts. The latest example of the "reality TV" genre, we notice, is a south-London family of five living in a mud hut in Swaziland for three months. What a long way we have come since the Wilkins family of Reading threw open their walls, lives and foibles to a fly in 1974.

Now you can't find a decent island anywhere without some group in various states of dysfunctionality talking to camera as day 15 passes and there are still problems with the water or the anti-social behaviour of the chartered accountant from Esher.

It's not safe here either: before you can blink, next door has been taken back in time and the neighbours are feverishly digging air-raid shelters or strolling self-consciously up the street in odd hats. Or being taken over by Alan Titchmarsh or Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen with diggers or drills. Help.

The Swaziland experiment, though, does at least promise some useful insights into other people's lives. We wonder if perhaps the next step might be to put our reality TV programme-makers in mud huts for longer than three months, without cameras.