Man fails to be eaten alive on “Eaten Alive”
You may have seen this but in case you missed it, there was a ridiculous show on Discovery the other day. Ok I will narrow it down. I used to work for Discovery and we broadcast such gems as Paralysed and Pregnant, I didn’t know I was pregnant, Too Fat for 15, a ton of stupid shows about ghosts and also shows about highly strung people looking for gold in various locales. Oh, and Honey Boo Boo.
“Eaten Alive” was an actual LIVE Discovery special, like when then that Nik Wallenda fellow crossed the Grand Canyon on a tightrope while reciting the bible. In that show, Discovery promised that the tightrope artist would cross the canyon (who may or may not be in the grips of religious fervour). Which is what actually happened – I was in the broadcast suite when we broadcast it live and it was tremendously exciting. He could have died at any second and we were all poised to cut to an ad break so you could be watching tampon adverts before he hit the canyon floor.
So recently they came up with another live spectacular called “Eaten Alive”. Given the title of this post you have probably already guessed what happens when a man called Paul Rosolie said he was going to be eaten alive by an anaconda. Some official programme descriptions even said you would see the belly of the beast. Lots of people complained that donning a squash-proof suit and then being eaten would be kind of cruel to the anaconda – who was just doing what it does after all. So when a mere 2 hours of anaconda goading goes past and the poor snake finally starts to eat him, you can imagine how the internet reacted when Mr Rosolie decides that he he doesn’t like it when his head is in the beasty’s mouth and it is squeezing his arms.
Apparently a 25 foot anaconda can squeeze quite hard and this came as something of a shock to all invloved. What I found a bit worrisome is how they managed to pull the poor snake off the attention seeking fool in such a short time. I bet they were a bit rough and as I said, the snake didn’t really ask to have a metal-clad publicity-grabbing moron stick his head in him.
No need to worry if you feel a strong compulsion to voice an opinion on this though, as online media has already shown Mr Rosolie what it feels.
Some comments from Twitter:
Calling it #EatenAlive is like having a show on the Food Network about cooking a turkey and all they do after 2 hours is preheat the oven.
@PaulRosolie didn’t need an anaconda. He’s getting #EatenAlive quite well by the Twitter universe.
This guy had one job. Literally one fucking job to get eaten alive and he fucked it up.
There are about a million more (sadly that’s not hyperbole), and that is just on Twitter.
Now don’t get me wrong, I actually really enjoy a lot of Discovery’s output as some of their history and science shows are brilliant. But this sort of shite is pure sensationalism and when it backfires it rightly gets crapped on by social media. I would love to say that I hope some of the viewers then went on to watch something more cerebral on Discovery but I suspect they just switched over to some show about a hillbilly family digging for gold while having emotional crises of some kind.
I’ll get off my high horse here as all I’m effectively doing publicising crap and taking easy shots at a guy for being dumb, along with the rest of the internet. But at least I’m doing what I set out to do.
In case you still care, here is the video with some footage of the inside of an anaconda’s mouth. Gripping…
