Iain Maciver writes …

SEEING the former Taransay castaways on TV this week, I now think there must have been something in the island’s water. It has made most of them look 30 years older. It was only eight years ago.

Most of them are fatter, balder and more wrinkly than they used to be. Only Ben Fogle looks the same. And me.

Having been dropped secretly into the island two weeks before the TV stars turned up, I was actually the first castaway. There to check it out for the newspapers, I found a bleak scene. No comfy pods there then.

I predicted posh Sassennachs would not last long. And they didn’t.

Within a day or two, there had been a mutiny led by that prissy practitioner and some of them were decanted, complaining it was unfit for young families, to Angy John’s flats opposite the Macleod Motel in Tarbert.

Yet there were seven or eight there whose faces you never saw on screen in Castaway 2000. You knew there were 36 of them, at least at the start, but a few were kept out of sight. Referred to occasionally, they were never seen in close-up. Like Captain Mainwaring’s wife, Elizabeth, in Dad’s Army.

And like me. My own spouse never sees it necessary to introduce me or ever speak of me in polite company. No point. I’m always three paces behind her.

Maybe Mick Jagger was one of the unseen castaways on Taransay. He, too, is suddenly ancient. His stones have been rolling about for a long time, I know, but I didn’t think he was due his free bus pass yet. It is not just that he has got older and uglier with the passage of time; he was never an oil painting. It’s just that his age has somehow fast-forwarded to 65.

Castaway 2000 is nowadays held up to be the first of the gritty reality TV genre. Not so, because although it was shown in the millennium year, followed closely by Big Brother, the first Dutch BB was shown in 1999.

Having foppish Fogle cornering and dispatching a red deer or using a toilet crafted by Billy Finlayson, of Marvins plumbers, the waterworks consultants for the series, did not change the world as we know it. Not the way seeing George Galloway as a pussy in BB did.

Reality TV shows were made in the Harris area before that. One was about a wee cheeky chappy called Donnie MacSween. I remember being transfixed at the sight of this lad waiting for the bus to take him to Leverburgh school in the 1960s programme A Boy From Harris. Lucky dipper, I thought. He’ll be the next Jimmy Savile and he’s from Scarista.

What became of him? Years later, after I finally got it together with the light of my life, she suggested that I should ask a minister she knew to officiate at our forthcoming nuptials. So I put in the call to this Reverend MacSween in a distant mainland parish on the other side of the country. He came and did the holy matrimony business bit. It was much later I found out he was that Donnie MacSween.

Child star or not, I hold that man personally responsible for the sorry excuse for a downtrodden life I now lead. He is still hiding in Evanton, I am told, but it’s just a case of waiting. They always come back to the scene of the crime.

Meanwhile, I thought we had made it unscathed through all the islands’ festivals. Then up pops another one. Stand by for the very first Creag Fest. This one is centred on a dinky little hamlet in Benbecula where the cattle show is being held today at Iochdar.

Apparently, someone had a word with Sandra MacSween, the ever-so-quiet, demure and well-spoken manageress of the Isle of Benbecula House Hotel at Creagorry, otherwise known as the Creag. She was told that the South Uist and Benbecula agricultural people were not applying for a beer tent licence for today’s show. The thirsty crofters were in shock.

Lesser publicans would maybe put on a few extra sandwiches for the boys and girls with the manure-encrusted wellies from the cattle show. Not Sandra. She has put on a whole festival. It lasts not just three hours, but five whole days – and nights.

Even the bill-topping Vatersay Boys will be holding court at the Creag some time between now and Sunday.

My own beloved mistress has informed me that she is taking another few days of special leave away from me to go and shake her thang in the Creag, as she puts it so eloquently.

Take as long as you want, my dear. I’ll manage here. Somehow.

Yes. Result. Thank you for creating Creag Fest, Sandra. You’re the best.

Published in the Press and Journal on July 30, 2008