Patrick Freyne on ‘Taking New York’

A bestubbled hunk called Jamie wakes up in a girl’s bed in a SoHo flat. He sneaks out, tiptoeing carefully from the room, the cameraman, sound person, lighting assistant and director following closely behind, probably also tiptoeing.

This is Taking New York (E4, Monday), a scripted reality show about feckless Brits living in a New York where women don't balk at the notion of picking up a whole camera crew.

Much like the colonists of yore, Jamie and his chums are set on building a new world. They represent, like Chaucer’s pilgrims, a useful cross-section of society – a gallery curator, a male model, an event planner, another male model, a third male model, an unemployed graduate and finally a male model.

Jamie is a professional hunk. Later at a hunk-shoot, Jamie meets his co-hunk and friend “Aussie Ben”, who has an Australian accent and is, I think, from Australia (in future episodes he will hopefully wear a hat with corks hanging from it so I can be sure). Jamie and Aussie Ben always have some version of this conversation.

“I like to have sex with ladies,” says Jamie.

“I too like having sex with ladies,” says Aussie Ben.

“In New York I have lots of sex with lots of ladies,” says Jamie.

The hunks high five.

Or this conversation:

“Do you know what I like, Aussie Ben?”

“Is it sex with ladies, Jamie?”

“It is, Aussie Ben.”

The hunks high five.

Jamie is clearly establishing himself as “the one who likes to procreate” thus becoming, not just the show’s “everyman”, but it’s “everymammal”.

Anyway, I assume the script of this scripted reality show also frequently say: “the hunks frolic”, as Jamie and Aussie Ben and whoever else is muscular and shirtless and in the vicinity, regularly roughhouse playfully in slow motion.

There are other people in this programme, though the hunks, frequently blindsided by their own reflections like cockatoos, are barely aware of them. There’s event-planner Sophie and her friend Georgie, who is rude to taxi-drivers and has a face like an angry egg. Sophie’s other friend, Gagan, a down-to-earth type who runs a party venue where yachts can dock, is thinking about hiring Georgie.

“She doesn’t like work,” says Sophie, who is her reference.

“I’m worried about that,” says Gagan reasonably, but during the interview with Georgie he says, “You have a lot of energy.” This is untrue. As he’s speaking, Georgie looks like someone has painted eyes on to her sleeping lids.

There’s also blindingly blonde Amy who works in a Williamsburg art gallery. She wears big black-rimmed, smart-person glasses when at work and golden parachute pants while at play, ignorant of how history will judge her.

In this episode, rather unsettlingly, she finds herself face-to-face with her own exact double. This freakish shadow- self turns out not to be to be a vampiric lamprey, suckling on her soul for sustenance (well, not just a vampiric lamprey, suckling on her soul for sustenance), but her twin sister, Other Amy.

Amy and Other Amy often have some version of this conversation:

“I like one of the hunks,” says Amy.

“Does the hunk like you?” asks Other Amy.

“I do not know,” says Amy sadly.

Cut to the hunks frolicking. They play basketball. The camera lingers on their lithe torsos.

Jamie has met another hunk who joins their hunk-team (you can’t go hunking without a team of at least three). He is called Henry and he has a secret sorrow. He lives with six other hunks in a tiny apartment. “It doesn’t exactly scream ‘fanny magnet’,” he says sadly.

That’s why I like the hunks. For most people, having a living space that inexplicably screamed “Fanny magnet!” would be uncanny and upsetting. Not Henry. “Fanny magnet!” his cursed hovel would scream and Henry would smile appreciatively. Jamie is sympathetic. His perv-pad most certainly shrieks “Fanny magnet!” as well as “Excelsior!” and “There is no God!” Jamie and Henry then hug one another with their shirts off, as hunks do in the wild.

Like scripted reality shows of the past, Taking New York has no real dramatic tension or narrative structure. The hunks out-hunk each other and Amy and Other Amy obsess over hunks and it's hard to care. But such programmes have a role in the wider television ecosystem.

Like marine biologists who must watch loads of stupid boring fish before they find a freaky, new kind of fish, like Jaws or Flipper, television producers and reviewers must observe hours of banal “reality” in the hope of discovering a new kind of person, like Katie Hopkins or Louie Spence or Joey Essex. Such discoveries can fuel reality television production for decades.

Indeed, over on Channel 4's The Jump, Davina McCall was firing Joey Essex off a mountain. If in the quest for such moments of sweet televisual glory we must watch hunks frolic, well, that's a price we're willing to pay. It's what Lord Reith would have wanted.