MILLENNIAL DIARY
WHEREVER she is, Caroline Flack is laughing. Though it seemed she had been taken down a peg or two (such is how we woke millennials refer to accusations of domestic abuse when the victim is not a woman), Caroline has erroneously emerged victorious after being dropped from Love Island, which she had hosted since its beginning. Because the first Love Island without Caroline Flack also happens to be worst Love Island yet. This could be the Love Island that kills Love Island forever — but it’s nothing to do with Caroline Flack, or poor old Laura Whitmore.
Love Island always worked because it was real; beneath all the layers of artifice — the producing, the editing, the fake hair, nails, teeth, the raw ambition to become Instagram influencers — there was something very true and very relatable. We recognised ourselves in these barely post-pubescent shiny influencers, in their jealousies, insecurities, rejections, confusion, in their deeply human irrational fears and desires. Love Island was a microcosm; now, a disconnect is clear. The show is no longer a mirror of us, but a mirror of itself.
The exuberant joy of gorgeous 20-year-olds, spoilt for choice, is absent: inevitably, the contestants are trying to play the system. The first couple of weeks is supposed to be enthusiastic bed hopping, torturous triangles, squares and hexagons and that one couple who stays together the whole time. For most of the seasons, it has been the latter couple who has won — and so now, everyone wants to claim that storyline.
But Love Island doesn’t work when pacts are made to ‘‘solemnly swear’’ off any more love triangles, when contestants emotionally manipulate each other into unnatural monogamy, when men become completely off-limits after 48 hours in a couple. The conflicts are bizarre, centring on the highly specific culture of
Love Island, with no bearing on real life at all: Paige was furious when Finley didn’t ‘‘approach’’ her at the correct time the other night. It was baffling. Contestants force each other to ‘‘apologise’’ and ‘‘warn’’ people of perceived slights, and ‘‘going about things in the right way’’ is the highest honour.
But this series does have one thing going for it: for an almost unbelievable 14 days, Love Island seemed to outrun its famous race problem: the two darkskinned black contestants were not left single, picked last, or not picked at all but coupled up early — with each other — and seemed happy. It was a relief to not tune in every night to watch a solitary young black person, in a house of lightskinned models, wondering aloud to the camera why nobody was interested in them, it was a relief to not shout, ‘‘BECAUSE RACISM, GODAMMIT’’ at the uncomprehending television every night.
And anyway, this series
Love Island is cultivating a height problem. The source of the outcry is (reportedly) 5” 7’ Nas — who doesn’t appear to have been in on the fact that he was being cast as the resident cutie-pie. The women of the villa are unified by their belief that any man under six foot is not an acceptable romantic partner. It feels cruel for producers to throw Nas in the mix when they know well that he doesn’t stand a chance — because they haven’t cast any women who would be open to fancying him.
Anyway, it’s providing plenty of fodder for men’s rights activist/incel types to complain about how shallow, spoilt and generally disgusting women are and that all the terrible things men say about women are justified because Siannise Fudge, a 20-year-old beauty therapist from Bristol, says she doesn’t want to have sex with short men.
Twelve seconds. It doesn’t matter how long Leo paused, or how much silence there actually was, because posterity will record one figure only: 12 seconds. 12 seconds, the story will go, is the length of time it took the Taoiseach to answer a question on his own drug use, on live television.
The Pause, as it will forever be known, has taken on a life of its own, divorced almost entirely from the drug question. I have watched and rewatched the clip, I’ve zoomed in on Leo, pressing the screen close to my face trying to understand what was going on in our Taoiseach’s mind for those 12 (the truth is immaterial) seconds.
“What do they know? What do they know?”
“I wonder if puritanical Gen Zs can vote yet?”
“What drugs are good drugs now?”
“Weed is fine but only when you’re a young starryeyed MD around town, not for children with epilepsy, right? Doesn’t sound right. Christ, I can’t say that!”
“What Leo-skin-suit did I put on today? Am I cool Leo?”
“Het Pless, preh- Hot Press...”
Twelve seconds: silence is golden.
Does anyone actually care whether Leo smoked a joint 20 years ago? I suspect not, not if we’re all really honest with ourselves. Indeed millennials would prefer a Taoiseach who relaxed with a nice big doobie after a hard day running the country, such a commitment to radical self-care would be admirable.
But The Pause reminded us what politicians really are: just an arrangement of rote-learned soundbites in an inoffensive suit.
We recognised The Pause from our French oral exams: it was The Pause of a man who was not himself, who couldn’t remember what he was supposed to say, who had failed to prepare.
“My house has two floors. I like to go on holiday with my family. I took illegal drugs a very long time ago.”
It was the pause of a ventriloquist’s dummy whose master got distracted. And for a generation obsessed with authenticity, there’s no bigger crime.