A comparison between Lord of the Flies and Expedition: Robinson

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Introduction

I have chosen to make a comparison between Lord of the flies and the TV-program Robinson because I think it’s interesting to see what happens when human people faces new challenges. In both cases the main persons tries to survive on a desolate island in the middle of nowhere. It’s an unfamiliar experience, and exactly that is why it becomes so interesting to read about or watch on the television.

William Golding’s novel Lord of the flies has become a classic, and that is not so strange. It describes closely how a bunch of boys drops down on an island. Their only hope to survive is to be rescued. The program Robinson does also deal with survival, but in this case the participants mission is to stay on the island as long as possible. They challenge each other in different many competitions and vote one person out every week.

This two similar surroundings and conditions give the book and the program equalities and differences as well. That is what I am going to try to analyse in this comparison. What are the differences and the equalities? Does it matter that Lord of the flies is serious and Robinson is just a TV-program? That is just some questions that I’ll try to answer.

Background

William Golding and Lord of the flies

William Golding was born in 1911 in the British city Cornwall. He studied at Marlborough Grammar School and at Brasenose College in Oxford. After the school had he many things going on; he worked as an actor, a lecturer, a small craft sailor, a musician, and finally a schoolmaster. His first volume was released in 1934, a rare book called Poems.

Golding joined the Royal Navy in 1940, and became a part in actions against battleships, aircraft and submarines. He was present at the sinking of the Bismarck, and ended his time in Army as a Lieutenant in command of a rocket ship. When his time in Army was over he went to Bishop Wordsworth’s school on Salisbury. It was here he was when his first novel Lord of the flies was released in 1954. 1961 did he give up teaching and dedicated his life to writing. He produced twelve more novels, including The Inheritors, Pincher Martin and The Spire.

His play The brass butterfly was produced at the New Theatre in Oxford 1958, directed by Alistair Sim. Peter Brook filmed Lord of the flies in 1963. Golding won the Booker Prize for his novel Rites of passage (1980) and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. Now he moved from the Wiltshire village that had been his home for half a century, to a house near Truro in Cornwall. 1988 was he knighted, a proof on his greatness. Golding died in his home in the summer of 1993, with a draft of a novel, The double tongue, left after him.

Expedition: Robinson

The idea of Robinson came from Charlie Parson from England. But the first TV-company to do the program was The Swedish Television, SVT. It started in 1997 and grew fast to a success that almost the whole Swedish people followed the series every Saturday evening. The idea is quite simple, and the program developed during the seven years that it was sent on SVT. When this is written, SVT had sent their last instalment of Robinson and the Swedish channel 3 have decided to follow up the successful program next autumn.

The program’s basic idea is to stay at the waste island where it all takes place as long as possible, without being voted out of the other participants in the island counsel. Every week is there a competition in which the participants can win immunity in the island counsel. The last four members of the expedition go further to the final, where both the rest of the participants and the TV-watchers can vote on there favourite. The best man or woman gets 500 000 Swedish crowns and the great honour.

This simple idea has developed to a mental game where pacts and treachery are the common everyday. With the hunger always tearing in the stomach (because rice is the only food they get, they need to catch and collect the rest of the food from what they find on the island) it isn’t strange that the participants get angry, irritated and fight about small things that we wouldn’t care about in normal cases. The watcher wonder every week how long the participants are prepared to go for there own survival, for getting food and to assure there own remaining on the island.

Expedition: Robinson was early such a big success so for example almost all of the Nordic countries have their own version.

A comparison

Setting
It’s around the 1950th and an atomic war is going on in the world. A bunch of boys between five and twelve years are evacuated from school, and flown away. In the middle of a big ocean the aeroplane is shot down and the pilot parachutes himself away. The aeroplane land on an island, and that’s where the boys assemble and where Lord of the flies takes place. Golding describes the island in detail; it has a deep jungle at one of the ends, with a rocky mountain above. In the other end there is a beautiful lagoon where the boys go bathing and have their meetings. In the mountain’s side there is a platform where the boys decide to have a fire burning the whole time. Their only chance to get rescued from the island, is the hope that boats or aeroplanes in the near will see the smoke and come and pick them up.

“This is our island. It’s a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us we’ll have fun” says Ralph, the democratic chose leader of the boys, in the beginning of the book. And yes, it could have developed to a nice visit on the beautiful island. They have all they want and need; food, a blue lagoon and fresh, wonderful water. But when a pair of boys was left alone on a desert island without any kind of contact with the real world there is a lot of things that can go wrong. Golding explores the fear for the unknown, the human behaviour and the need for society that we have created in our modern civilisation.

Expedition: Robinson started in 1997 on the Swedish Television, SVT, after an idea from Charles Parson from England. It was the first real-life-soap the Swedish TV-watchers had seen and grew fast to an obvious element in the TV-tableau. The basic idea is to do a survival-program with ordinary people as actors. The around twenty participants got limit with food and should live and built a miniature-society on the desert island (most of the seasons somewhere in the warm and humid Malaysian archipelago). Beyond the struggle for survival there is a weekly island counsel where the participants vote one person out. To sit safe in this island counsel you have to win the competition before. It is different competitions every weak, in some you need to be strong and in some you have to use more brain to solve the problem. In the big final with the last four participants, both the other participants and the whole Swedish people vote on their favourite.

Both Lord of the flies and Robinson take place during un-normal circumstances, on a desert island without contact with the rest of the world and with limit inventories of food. This leads to unfamiliar situations, and it doesn’t matter if it is adults or children who are going trough it.

Characters
The first thing the boys in Lord of the flies do when they arrive to the island is to choose a leader for the group. They see these as the most important and natural thing to do if they are suppose to have a working community there. The participants in Robinson don’t elect a leader in the same way as the boys, but in every new group they form there is always a leader. And it isn’t just at the islands we always have a leader. In all kind of groups there is some kind of leader. We have a coach in our soccer team, an unwritten leader in the little group of pupils that are doing schoolwork together or a leader of the people, like a president. As you can see some of the leaders are elected and some are just natural leaders. But even if you are elected it lies in your nature to be a leader, some people are born to be leaders and always take the leadership of a group.

In groups there is always a “risk” that there are two equal strong leaders. Lord of the flies is a perfect example of that. In addition to Ralph there is a boy called Jack, who also wants to have the leadership. A conflict looms up between the two boys, and degenerates into two different camps. A real “war” breaks out among the gangs. In Robinson there had also been conflicts between strong leaders. Even here it does often collapse with anger and trouble as result. Of course you wish to get a democratic solution, but it seems to be hard when you have to do with human people, they want quite simply have right and to be the one who leads if it lies in his/her nature.

Piggy, the boy with asthma and glasses in Lord of the flies, becomes the one that you can laugh at and make fun of. He talks constantly about his aunt and does always wants to take the safe before the uncertain. He is a typical nerd in the western world, and also on the island. Piggy is the one that you don’t mind of, he is so harmless. The participants in Robinson who act in the same way are often the ones who are left on the island longer. They are not seen as any threat against the others and can be left there. This model apply in “real” life to, people don’t mind about others are undamaging.

Food is all the time a debated subject in both Lord of the flies and Robinson. One part wants to hunt and have meat to eat. When they have got their meat is the question if everybody in the community are worth to eat it or if it is just the one who have killed the animal who should have it? It seems that as long as everything is peaceful on the islands can everybody eat, and they share all the food and shelters. But when Jack, the other “leader” in Lord of the flies, have divided the boys into his own and Ralph’s and chooses to invite to a party does he use the meat as a bait to get the rest of the boys on his side. The meat becomes a symbol for power and success. Ralph, instead, does only think of being rescued from the island. In some cases that seem to be less worth than food, but the question is why the boys don’t value rescue equal with food? In Robinson can a person that don’t collect wood or help the community to survive in another ways be seen as lazy and don’t worth staying on the island. In Lord of the flies, where you don’t can vote somebody out, is they’re instead a risk that the other start to look at the lazy person as something that are not worth eat or sleep in the shelters.

The participants in Robinson are carefully chosen out of thousands of candidates. The TV-company tries to have a mix of different personalities. They do often talk about the good, the bad, the evil and the Christ like. People take the same roles on a desert island as they play in the “real” life at home and the TV-company wants to make an interesting program with conflicts, love and passion. Just for the reason that they want watchers to their program.

Plots
A dead parachutist sink down to the Lord of the flies’ island on a dark night and land up on the mountain on the island. Some of the small children, walking around in the dark, see this “beast” sitting on the top with his parachute flapping around him. This beast frightens the whole island and the boys stay on the beach. After a while they decide to send out the hunters to defeat him. They are scared to, so when they find the beast sitting up on the mountain they ran away. In Robinson the participants know that it is just a game and that the island is safe. But even then there can be things that worry them, a sick friend for example. There maybe is a difference between adults and children? The adults may have learned how to face fear already in the “real” life and are more prepared for that kind of situations.

The boys in Lord of the flies try to keep up their rules and laws for every price. They are breed up in a Western world with rules for everything, even some un-written for how you eat proper. With this background it isn’t so strange that they do everything for keeping a working society, also when they are on this deserted island. The people in Robinson build special places for everything, a place that can be like a kitchen and so on. The boys in Lord of the flies do in the same way to, and the question is if the need for rules are congenital or something that the society have thought us to need? I want to say that the necessity has grown more and more when we have become more humans on this planet. The more we are, the more rules we need to keep the society going without any troubles.

Robinson was not thought as a mental game from the beginning, but after a few seasons it had developed to a complicated strategy experiment. How many pacts could the participants form with different people before someone flippes out of all the dishonesties? All the pacts are of course an assurance for yourself so you know that you don’t get out-voted. But it’s maybe also a cloak? If you don’t have the strength to be your own person and stand for your opinions the little group with people is a security for you, where you have people who thinks the same as you. Also in Lord of the flies I see this, but not in same cowardly way. The boys have a need of belonging to a group. The small boys who are just playing on the beach all the time are soon called “littluns” and Ralph, Jack, Piggy and the other older boys are called “biguns”. With these designations they are automatically members of a group and can feel safe together with the other members.

Time
Lord of the flies is called a classic and Robinson has high watch numbers every week. What Things in this book/TV-program do we find so special and interesting? Since we learned how to read and since the TV was invented have our possibilities to reach “other” worlds outside our increased. We are quite simply curious to know what happens when a bunch of people tries to survive on a desert island. The tension that we can’t get in our usual ...