There’s nothing lovely about Love Island
EVERY now and then I flick through the Sky channels and stop on UK Gold. It is a bit like Larry Gogan’s Golden Hour. When I was growing up I couldn’t stand all the auld music he played whereas now his programme is the soundtrack to my teens.
In the same way, UK Gold is now playing a lot of those shows that I was reared on. Only Fools and Horses; Birds of a Feather; Keeping Up Appearances and of course Black Adder all bring me for a trip down nostalgia lane.
The tone and wit of the writing as well as the general warmth of the episodes tallies with my memories of what it was like growing up. Gornogrophy or the Game of Thrones-style blood and lust TV simply didn’t exist back then. And the only chance you had of seeing any bit of flesh was if you stayed up late at night to watch the Channel 4 banned series.
So I started wondering what we will think when we look at today’s TV 20 years down the line and I had a flick at the TV3 juggernaut Love Island. This is a show that gets a bunch of hunks and bimbos and throws them into a sun-kissed island with a view to finding their ideal mate.
THEY spend the day mulling over first world problems like, ‘Why won’t she talk to me even though I only know her 24 hours’ or the merits of spooning.
Peacocking males compare abs in a bid to impress the females who vary in hue from jaffa orange to mahogany. Couples pair up and share double beds, go on dates and compete to win prizes. These include a night in the hideaway, which is basically a secluded area away from everyone else and is totally private (apart from all those cameras of course).
Eleven contestants are taking part, meaning there is no doubt someone will be left alone and broken-hearted tonight.
This year they’re a varied group which includes West End performer Samira, construction worker Niall as well as doctor Alex. But there are a few who are already used to the limelight.
Eyal Booker, who once was in boyband EverYoung, is looking for love, as is the daughter of EastEnders actor Danny Dyer... who’s called Dani Dyer.
This week has all been about the subjects’ desperate bids to ‘couple up’ as the programme-makers gear up for a humiliating ceremony that will see one partner-less man ‘dumped’ from the island tonight.
The villa is a bit like the upsidedown world of Stranger Things or Opposite Land. Take male contestant Alex. In the real world he is exactly what you would call a catch. Tall, with a Hugh Grantstyle foppish barnet and apparently in good shape, he is practising A&E doctor.
Normally this sort of package would be appealing. But in Love Island, due to his alleged lack of pecks and shortage of abs, he has been deemed the runt of the litter.
The show has been cast to include a cross-section of modern society through the filter of Instagram highlighted by the inclusion of Jack (the lad), the cocky Cockney who admits to cheating on all his girlfriends and has a set of whitened gnashers visible at night from the space station.
When we look back at this in 20 years, we won’t get a glimpse of a society that has embraced the Time’s Up movement. Nor will we view the enlightened population that voted for same sex marriage and to allow women to gain control over their own bodies in the recent referendum.
No, instead we will be reminded that for five weeks of the year we idolised a group of vacuous narcissists who, I’m sure, if they thought they would get a free drink, would agree the world is, in fact, flat.
My real problem is of course that I am hooked on the blooming thing. Much like Blue Planet or Attenborough’s celebrated Galapagos series I am fascinated by this group of homo sapiens.
However it may be the first time I’ve been rooting for the mass extinction event. Of course in reality, much like that catchphrase from Only Fools and Horses, the contestants will have the last laugh and by this time next year they’ll be millionaires.
mother was hugely pregnant with one of his brothers, she never let on she was carrying a baby inside, let alone how it had got there.
A predominantly male household and an all-boys school meant that for the young Stringfellow, girls were a mystery — exotic creatures, that he put on pedestals.
He left school at 15 after an unimpressive scholastic career (he was dyslexic but good at maths). Next came a two-month stint in the Merchant Navy (which he hated), a job in a bakery (where he met a girl called Norma, married her and almost immediately started sleeping with her cousin), followed by a job as a door-to-door salesman and eight weeks in prison for stealing carpets.
On his release, he had sex with his pregnant wife in the back of a car while his dad sat in the front, eyes firmly on the road.
His next foray was into rock’n’roll. He held his first hop in a church hall renamed the Black Cat Club in Sheffield in 1962.
And it was as he stood on stage for the first time, spotlight on him, microphone in hand, that everything changed. Finally, he had found his calling and the girls came flocking. He made love to one of them in the back of his van that very first night. And every night after.
By the time his daughter, Karen, was born, his business — soon he was promoting The Beatles, The Kinks, the Rolling Stones and Fleetwood Mac — and sex life were taking off in tandem. Conveniently, he never considered it infidelity on the basis he wasn’t bothered about the conquests.
Until, that is, he met Coral who gave birth to their son, Scott, in January 1966. She became wife No. 2 in August 1966 and, immediately after the wedding ceremony, he left to DJ at a club in Nottingham, had sex with a woman from the crowd, before driving back to Sheffield to consummate the marriage.
And so it went on . . . conquest after conquest. He once said the secret to monogamy was lying.
Meanwhile, his empire was growing — clubs in Leeds, Manchester and eventually, after borrowing £1 million, Stringfellow’s in London in 1980.
It may be regarded as naff now, but at the time, Stringfellow’s was properly cool and packed with celebrities, including Marvyn Gaye, Rod Stewart and Eddie Murphy.
Everyone who was anyone went there, with Stringfellow lording it in the middle on his gold throne — the best connected man in London and, according to his staff and dancing ‘angels’, a delight to work for.
He ran a very tight ship, used to joke that his clubs were run ‘with more rules than Westminster’ (including a strict no-touching rule for his dancers). In 1996, he introduced lap-dancing to the UK and, in 2002, applied for a ‘full nudity’ licence from Westminster Council and got it.
He was Stringfellow’s and he adored working. But eventually, even he began to slow down.
In one interview he admitted he’d had to cut back a bit: ‘My appetite now can satisfy one lady and that’s enough,’ he said. ‘The effort in running two or three girls is just too much . . .’ Enough! It was at about this time that he met Bella. Her father’s reaction wasn’t helped by the unfortunate coincidence of how he found out about his daughter’s new love in the first place.
Bella was back at home one weekend when Peter, characteristically over-refreshed, slipped as he grabbed a bottle of Vina Sol from the fridge in his Majorcan villa and phoned her in distress. She told her parents she had to fly to Spain because her boyfriend had dislocated his shoulder.
Naturally, they were sympathetic and supportive — until an hour later when they were watching the news and Peter’s face popped up with the announcement he’d dislocated his shoulder in Majorca.
Bella’s dad turned grey. Who can blame him? But fast forward 18 years and, astonishingly, Bella and Peter were still together, married for nine years, utterly faithful and still so besotted they’d leave little love notes around the apartment for each other.
It’s a big decision to start a family in your 70s, when you already wear a hearing aid and know you’re unlikely to see your children grow up.
But particularly in Peter’s case because in 2009, just months after their Barbados wedding, he was diagnosed with lung cancer, and had most of a lung and a couple of ribs removed.
(Bella dressed up in a skimpy Agent Provocateur nurse’s outfit to remove his stitches and mop his brow.) They went ahead and in 2013 Rosabella was born. Angelo followed two years later. Peter was completely obsessed with his new family.
HE DID the school run. He changed nappies. He talked about his children constantly, photographed them, watched videos of them. He became a ‘new’ man. And, perhaps inevitably, he tried to rewrite history.
After years of going on (and on) about his epic sex life, he suddenly refused to discuss his hedonistic years, as though they’d never happened. ‘As far as I’m concerned, the past is the past. Gone,’ he’d say very firmly. ‘Other than my own family past and my success with the business, of course.’ Of course. Presumably he was trying to protect Bella, but she had her own explanation.
‘I think he just wasn’t with the right person [before]. I met him towards the end of his crazy lifestyle.’
After some years in remission, sadly, Stringfellow’s cancer returned last year. He was taken ill on the way home from a holiday in Italy last summer and rushed to hospital where he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
It was clear to everyone around him that this was the beginning of the end, but for months he fought hard, refusing to give up on his young family, hoping he’d live long enough for his children to remember him and reminding Bella over and over that she must get on with her life and find love again.