Channel Hop
You can lose your marbles or lose the plot, but to voluntarily lose yourself is beyond the imagination of most people. To be truly lost is hard to achieve in these hi-tech times, but that is what Lost (premiering on i-Cable's A1 channel tomorrow night at 10pm) is all about.
After an 18-hour flight and four-hour helicopter ride, six blindfolded Americans (all of them strangers and in three teams of two) are dropped off in the middle of nowhere. Jetlagged and clueless, they have no maps, no credit cards and no mobile phones with which to communicate with the outside world. All they are equipped with is basic survival gear and US$10 until they work out where they are. The aim of the game is to be the first team to make it back to the Statue of Liberty in New York, where the winners will share a US$200,000 booty and drive away with a sports utility vehicle each.
Filmed in 2001, Lost is the poor relative of The Amazing Race, a slick show that offers an impressive US$1 million in prize money. Lost is the brainchild of Conan O'Brien, while The Amazing Race is a Jerry Bruckheimer production, which explains the different approaches. O'Brien is more subtle, hoping his race with a twist will speak for itself, while Bruckheimer pulls out all the stops and offers viewers a 'supersize' production full of drama and suspense with egos to match.
The two shows do have one thing in common, however: all the competitors failed basic geography in high school - at least that's the impression one gets from watching them in action. Or do the producers allow only participants with no knowledge of the world on their shows? Sad as it is, their ignorance provides a few laughs - but it would help if they knew a few basics, like the Earth really is round.
Back to Lost, and the teams - Carla and Lando, Tami and Celeste, and Joe and Courtland - vainly try to get their bearings. Brimming with confidence, Carla and Lando are first off the blocks, while Tami and Celeste proclaim they are on a 'blonde ambition tour' and play follow the leader but soon fall behind because of their heavy packs. Joe and Courtland, meanwhile, find some tracks in the dirt and decide they will lead them to civilisation.
After numerous clues, Carla and Lando are the firstto discover where they are. They contact the producers by special satellite phone. 'We're in Mongolia,' Carla tells them. She's right, and she's given the combination to a small box in their packs that holds their passports and US$360.
Tami, a mother of four, and Celeste ('I'm a beauty queen; I'm not supposed to be lying in the dirt or in tents and hiking through the forest. I'm a beauty queen, God damn it') are the next to phone in, and also (surprisingly) get it right. But Joe and Courtland have no idea. They stumble on some locals and decide they are in 'Chekla. Checkla ... slavakia ... Republic in Russia.' Bzzz. Try again, guys. 'I can't believe we got it wrong, dude,' Joe whines as they hang up their satellite phone. Oh well, two out of three ain't bad. But the best quote comes from Joe, who discovers the source of his favourite cheese. 'Look - gen-u-ine goat cheese, straight from the goat [did he think it came from a packet?]. This is the cheese that is in my salad all the time. Whoo!' Thanks for enlightening us. Coming
from New York, he probably thinks milk comes from a carton, too.
From being in lost in Mongolia, we head to China, where an extraordinary archaeological discovery was made in Jiangsu province in 1984. The Mystery of the Disorderly Warriors (showing on Tuesday at 10.05pm on ATV World) is a fascinating account of an army of pint-sized warriors (below right) and how archaeologists solved the mystery surrounding the Western Han dynasty (206BC-9AD) king they were guarding. While the life-size terracotta army in Xi'an, Shaanxi province, is universally known, experts say this find is one of the most important of the 1980s.
A joint production between Gulliver Media Australia and CCTV, Disorderly Warriors takes us back 2,000 years to the Lion Hill Tomb and its contents, revealed after a group of schoolboys stumbled upon the terracotta head of a statue. Their find sparked an investigation by members of Suzhou Museum's archaeological department, including two of the country's leading archaeologists, Qiu Yongsheng (above; left) and Wang Kai (above; right). It took them six years to find the king's tomb, uncovering 4,000 warriors and horses nearby, only to discover grave robbers had beaten them to the prize.
Combining re-enactments, interviews with the leading players and archival footage as the tomb is painstakingly opened, they set out to find why many of the warriors were broken and why the tomb was unfinished, as though the king had been buried hurriedly.
As the mystery unfolds, the archaeologists' patience is rewarded and they put the final jigsaw piece into place. What they uncover is an astonishing tale of robbery, rebellion, an offended emperor, suicide and a hasty burial. After 2,000 years, the mystery is solved - and it sounds like the perfect storyline for a modern-day soap opera.
