All those Gilligan's Island episodes contain clues to its serious message: the show was really about a 'communist paradise'

It was one of America’s best-loved sitcoms at the height of the cold war, but a new documentary claims Gilligan’s Island was in fact a hymn to “communist” values.

In the last interview before he died in 2011, Sherwood Schwartz - the television producer who also created The Brady Bunch - said that the fictional utopia he invented for a group of castaways on a tropical island was meant as a light-hearted critique of capitalism.

Award-winning filmmaker Cevin Soling said that Schwartz, a biologist who began his career writing jokes for Bob Hope, “affirmed to me what I had long suspected ... that Gilligan’s Island was a communist paradise”.

All property on the island was shared and the series’ main heroes were its only two working-class characters - the bumbling ship’s mate Gilligan and salt-of-the-earth striver Mary Ann.

Although far from a communist himself, the left-leaning Schwartz told the documentary The Gilligan Manifesto, which was presented at the MIPTV gathering at the French Riviera resort of Cannes this past weekend, that the comedy had a serious political side.