Hot Mess Summer review: This atrocity is the dregs at the bottom of reality TV’s glass

We had our shot after the dinosaurs were rendered extinct and we blew it. Humankind has reached the summit of its evolutionary potential.

From here on, it’s going to be a long, slow, depressing slide backwards into the primordial soup from which we once bubbled and burbled into life.

Where is the evidence for this pessimistic theory? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the contestants in Hot Mess Summer (Amazon Prime Video, all episodes from Wednesday, February 7), a new reality show hosted by Rylan Clark.

There are eight of them, four young men and four young women, and every single one is, without a shadow of a doubt, a fundamental orifice of incalculable dimension.

Nothing remarkable about that; reality TV show makers love making people look dumb or nasty for ratings. You kind of have to be if your burning ambition is to appear in something like this.

But few if any have ever been as thick, vacuous, lazy, mouthy, narcissistic, entitled and unlikeable as this lot.

They’re introduced, one by one, with a description provided, unbeknownst to them, by their friends.

There’s Alfonso, “party pusher”; Amin, “player”; Dabi, “princess”; Liv, “wild child”; Dan, “scrapper”; Chloe, “reckless”; Jay, “snob”, and Rebecca, “disloyal”. Actually, there’s a single word that would describe all of them far more concisely and just as truthfully: “waster”.

Among the things they don’t know (and I’m guessing it’s a long list) is that their friends are the ones who nominated them to take part in the show.

They arrive on the Greek island of Zante, a party paradise for horny, pissed-up twentysomethings, and are transported to the luxury villa that will be their home for the summer.

They believe they’ve been selected — presumably on the basis of their irresistible charisma and sizzling sex appeal — to take part in a reality show called Party Summer, which promises six weeks of boozy, libidinous fun, and all on Amazon’s tab.

And that’s exactly what they get... for one evening. The next morning, Rylan turns up and, barely disguising the pleasure he’s taking from this part, reveals the truth.

They’ve been duped. There is no show called Party Summer. There’s only this show, and for the next six weeks they’re not going to be partying their way through the summer, they’re going to be watching others like them partying their way through the summer.

They’re going to spend their time working behind a bar, not propping one up. They’ll have to learn how to mix drinks, serve customers in a civilised manner and clean up the mess they’d normally be the ones leaving behind for other to take care of.

There are strict rules: no drinking on the job and no getting off with the customers. Watching stubbled jaws drop open and fake eyelashes flutter as they absorb all this is the sole sliver of fun to be had from Hot Mess Summer.

It gets worse for them when they’re shown videos of their friends explaining that they’re fed up with their selfish, thoughtless, childish, irresponsible, self-obsessed behaviour, and that they nominated them for the show to teach them a lesson in the hope they’ll cop on

It gets worse for them when they’re shown videos of their friends explaining that they’re fed up with their selfish, thoughtless, childish, irresponsible, self-obsessed behaviour, and that they nominated them for the show to teach them a lesson in the hope they’ll cop on.

Then the uproar starts. “I cancelled a holiday for this,” whines Jay, a self-styled ‘VIP’ who blithely admits he’s never worked a day in his life and would be happy to let his parents bankroll his lifestyle forever.

“The only thing I wanna be working is a girl’s behind,” says Amin, a real charmer who’s running neck-and-neck with Jay as nature’s most shocking squandering of flesh, bones and vital organs.

A few of them talk about going home, but the lure of a £60,000 prize, the presence of TV cameras and everyone’s ingrained inability to be anything other than the centre of attention keeps them there.

Rylan is too good to be presenting this junk, but at least he doesn’t have to do much to earn his fee. The one you feel sorry for is bar manager Lee.

Trying to whip these idiots into shape is like trying to teach eight pot plants to read.

Hot Mess Summer is the sticky dregs from the bottom of reality TV’s shot glass. It’s based on a Swedish show called The Bar. It’s a low one.

‘​Hot Mess Summer’ is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video