TV review: Crusoe | Wife Swap

DESPITE its status as virtually the first novel in English, there has never been a BBC classic serial of Robinson Crusoe, presumably because the diffuse plot and mostly solitary main character make it too difficult to adapt. Crusoe, an American TV series that Five are burning off in the school holidays in daily afternoon doses, gets round all that by cheerfully throwing Daniel Defoe's venerable original novel overboard in favour of pure hokum. And it's heaps of fun.

This version of the character is an 18th-century beefcake who's also a mad inventor, like a live action equivalent to Nick Park's Wallace. Having been washed up (with a loveable dog) after a shipwreck, he's built himself an incredible multi-level treehouse so snazzy you expect Kevin McCloud to talk us through its grand design.

There is an automatic lift worked by rope pulleys, a zipslide transport system and even a nifty machine for juicing oranges. Well, even castaways need their five a day. But it does have a downside: apparently the mobile phone reception is rubbish.

Just like that other show about people lost on an island, there are flashbacks to his pre-castaway days. Every so often he squints into space to herald a memory of dad Sean Bean, drippy wife Anna Walton and dodgy friend Sam Neill, who is so unctuous he must have set Crusoe up to be shipwrecked.

At least he's got Friday – here a multilingual poetry fan who's an expert archer and keeps turning up in the nick of time to save the day. Their relationship is a bantering bromance – it could be called "I Love You Man (Friday)" – and they probably spend their off-hours bonding over spa sessions as both resemble GQ models with their waxed chests and styled hair.

But in this two-hour opener, they were busy dodging some Pirates of the Caribbean wannabes in search of fabled gold. This Crusoe's island is hardly deserted; there are so many visitors it must be on a cruise ship route. Yet, naturally, every time a ship turns up there is some reason why he can't leave and must stay to squint and spa some more.

Literary purists may mock, but you can only admire the cheek of the show's whole-hearted appropriation. Like its predecessors Hercules and Xena, or even the old Tarzan movies, this is escapist action adventure which exists in a fantasy world (but without, thankfully, the latter's racial attitudes). Better turn off your brain, though, or you'll start wondering why, Crusoe's so brilliant, he hasn't yet managed to invent a boat.

After 83 episodes of family exchange trips, the last ever Wife Swap was a typical example of the show's strengths and weaknesses. It was easy to be drawn into the contrasting worlds of Torre – a lady who lunches and whose comfortably off family all do their own thing – and Sam, a much poorer woman with seven kids, but whose partner and children are the closest family unit outside the Waltons.

Torre was shocked by the amount of housework and restricted life she experienced in Sam's home, while Sam was disturbed by the lack of warmth at Torre's.

But after a genuinely interesting exchange in which both brought in new rules, it degenerated into a slanging match at the reunion. The abrasive Torre was so determined to establish that she had nothing to learn from Sam that she went on a rude rant.

Their insights were lost in reality show bluster, which sums up the whole format really.