Tomoaki Hamatsu was a sensation over the year he stayed alone in a single room amusing the camera, but this documentary is not as charming as it thinks

There’s an extraordinary story that could be told here about the birth of reality television in all its cruelty and superficiality. In 1998, a Japanese TV light-entertainment show called Susunu! Denpa Shōnen (“Caution! Crazy Youth”) persuaded an excitable young man, desperate for fame, to live for over a year in a single room, at first in Japan and then Korea, apparently with no human contact and no clothes, kept on starvation rations of crackers and told to do nothing but fill in entry postcards for magazine competitions – mail-in sweepstakes, with the winning card randomly picked. He was told that on winning a million yen’s worth of goods his mission would be complete; moreover he was allowed to eat and drink whatever edible or drinkable prizes he could get, including dog food. And all the time his ordeal was being broadcast to a huge Japanese TV audience without his realising it.

This was around the time of the movie The Truman Show and before our own TV staple Big Brother. It is genuinely mind-boggling, and yet this unsatisfying, naive and fundamentally uncritical documentary, despite careful modern-day interviews with the participants, doesn’t get to grips either with the story’s implications or with the story itself.