We Got Wasted with Some Grandparents and Their Grandkids

In the summer of 2015 I was flown to Madrid by a car company to watch will.i.am do something utterly absurd in an abandoned airfield. It wasn't the first time in my life that the world of PR had brought forth something odd for me to witness, which is entirely unsurprising: it's no secret that PR-led trips and parties seem to exist in weird, boozy vacuums where nothing truly makes sense. An idea vaguely related to the programme or event is conjured up. Spaces are booked. Invites are sent out. Drinks are had. Journalists who have never met before struggle to get along.

It's a special relationship – akin to that of the Anglo-American link of the mid-2000s – between content pushers and those who provide the access. In the scenario that follows, I am the content pusher and MTV is the provider of access. The access is to the cast of a TV show called Spring Break with Grandad.

Spring Break with Grandad is a programme in which a group of young people go to Cancún, Mexico for "Spring Break", but take one of their grandparents with them. There's a mixture of American contestants and British contestants. The show is overseen by Gaz Beadle of Geordie Shore, who makes sure the revellers are partying hard enough, lest they be sent home. The entire premise of the show is that the partying must be hard, at all times, from both grandparents and grandchildren. They must drink, they must shag, they must strip. It's like BBC Three vehicle Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents, except the suspicious parents are in amongst the sesh, and are about 20 years older than usual.

In the first episode, Aaron from Manchester engages in drunken copulation with American Ashleigh, and bulky West Country lad James' equally bulky grandfather Andy gets wasted and takes his chopper out, necessitating a fair few pixels in the process.

It is, of course, a load of garbage. This is no criticism, just a plain truth. Garbage is now a genre in and of itself. You can make good garbage and you can make bad garbage. Jersey Shore was good garbage. Geordie Shore is bad garbage. America's Next Top Model is good garbage. Britain's Next Top Model is bad garbage. Do you see a trend emerging here?

Spring Break with Grandad mixes Brits and Yanks together, and the results make you feel oddly patriotic. While the English behave in a manner only suitable for the most catastrophic subjects of Booze Britain, the demure Americans go to bed early and play hard to get.

But do they live up to these lofty expectations in real life? To find out, I was invited to meet the cast – grandparents included – in a bar in Soho for a typical Spring Break-esque night out.

In the basement of Barrio sat several cast members and some faces I didn't recognise from the first episode. There with the cast were an assortment of vloggers, who I'm told were helping with the promotion of the show. I had never seen these vloggers before, and I watch an unseemly amount of YouTube all day every day. I asked one of them how many subscribers they had, "because that's what matters, isn't it?" They looked offended and said 20,000, but assured me it's not so much about numbers these days, but engagement – which sounded kind of true. Still, I doubt she'd say no to a million more on top of that 20,000.

Nearby, the PRs and marketeers from MTV sat at what I would call the grown-ups table. It was adjacent to the special room me, the vloggers and the reality stars were in, close enough to keep an eye on us but far away enough to have an adult conversation. Every now and then they would bring over a tray of shots to be downed by all attendees.

I sat next to Paige and Victoria, who told me that since the end of filming they'd become the best of friends – inseparable. They even told me about an incident involving a woman shoving Victoria onto the street. "Trouble seems to follow us around!" said Paige. I asked them both how they came to be on the show, and each replied that they were contacted through Facebook. They were lovely young ladies, who did not at all give into my probing questions about how real the show actually is. "You forget the cameras are there when you're being filmed 24/7," said Paige.

Next, I had a chat with some of the old-timers. Bob, Paige's grandad, is the most subdued of the grandparents. While Andy was talking to me about his career as a stripper and bodybuilder in California, Bob wanted to show me his homing doves and the birdhouse he built.

As we chatted, the booze kept flowing and more vlogging types arrived. The space in the cocktail bar became a little cramped, while the adults lounged around on their nice big table.

At this point it was difficult to know what to do next with the stars of Spring Break for Grandad, as they're all just kind of normal guys and girls who were poached on Facebook for a weird family holiday.

So for a change of scene we moved on to a more salubrious venue down the road, where champagne was served. The cast were beginning to get more drunk, and I, on an empty stomach, was getting very pissed indeed.

Victoria, the chirpiest of the lot, sat down next to me for a chat. I asked her if the production crew supplied the cast with any drugs to keep them going, because partying all day and all night every day for a month can be exhausting. She vehemently denied it, and said the stipulations of the show meant any drug-taking would be punishable by expulsion.

Of course I believe her, though I was a little disappointed by the news. I wanted there to be a semblance of debauchery to this process, but it all seemed quite clean and wholesome. They all, young and old, said it was the best summer of their lives. I felt guilty for trying to coax admissions of criminality and subterfuge out of them.

But also not that guilty, as I was completely, blindly hammered. I'm not really sure what happened in the hour after this photo was taken, but the next thing I knew everyone was gone. All the cast, all the MTV people. It was just me and my trusty photographer alone in a Soho bar at midnight on a Wednesday. It was a little disappointing. These guys were meant to be the ultimate intergenerational party animals. I was expecting a closing time hotel room sesh with Andy, James, Paige and Victoria, eating Toblerone, necking vodka miniatures and sleeping on the hard floor.

Alas, it wasn't meant to be. Perhaps some hackneyed metaphor can be made about how reality TV just slips into your life, inebriates and stupefies you, and then leaves without a trace.

Or perhaps I was just treated to a binge drinking session in the hope of a good review. Spring Break with Grandad is on at 10PM every Monday on MTV. I guess it's good, if you like that sort of thing.

Thursday was a bad day.

@joe_bish

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