NO LOVE, NO ISLAND BUT ALL THAT
Look away and you'll miss something, like, vital, writes Alex Casey.
As the opening scene of Love Island echoes: life, it’s the same old routine 24/7. We’re all chewing away at our humdrum jobs, trapped in slow-moving black and white. If only we could be like the Love Island contestants, who miraculously whip off their office garb in technicolour to reveal sequin bikinis, budgie smugglers and immaculate fake tans. Why are they wearing togs under all their clothes in the middle of the CBD? A guideline that remains crucial to your Love Island experience is to not ask too many questions.
The first thing you have to know about the British romance reality juggernaut Love Island is that it’s not really an island. The enormous shag pad may be nestled somewhere on Mallorca, yes, but the beachiest thing you’ll find is a Windows 95 palm-tree screensaver that sits behind contestants in their confessionals. One by one, Instagram influencers, music producers and models are ceremoniously introduced into the house like animal-tested beagles being released into the wild for the very first time.
Sam, an oil rig worker from Essex, reckons the house is so big that Henry VIII must have lived there before them. History will show that he was a huge fan of neon beanbags and “sperm infested” Jacuzzis during his reign. Once inside, the frantic coupling begins based on nothing but appearance and a few one-liners. Before you scoff: Tinder. The main objective of Love Island is to stay in a pair — any pair — as new people are introduced and the numbers skew odd. If you are there at the end you get £50,000. Easy.
If you think Love Island pales in comparison to the interpersonal complexity of Westeros, think again. Drift away for an episode, let alone several minutes, and you’ll return to Love Island to find entirely new couples, contestants and body jewellery configurations unlike the world has ever seen. With pacy editing and whiff of desperation in the air, it fast becomes a tense game of human pass-the-parcel. Marcel and Amber last all of two minutes, Chloe and Kem remain a pair because they have no one else. “I’m like one of those Easter eggs which has been fridged for too many days,” warns Sam, “you ain’t going to crack me.”
Despite having a large social media element and personalised text messages guiding the narrative of the show, nobody involved in Love Island seems to have any ideas what hashtags are. “Hashtag looks, hashtag game, hashtag personality, hashtag everything,” says Chris, arbitrarily shouting through the fairy-lit courtyard. Perhaps the hashtag confusion is related to the fact that the whole house is labelled. The fridge says "cool" on it, the kitchen bench says "spice". A table in the lounge says, you guessed it, "lounge". I don’t know if it’s serving us or them, but based on
'Jessica's ears are burning ... her legs look pretty hot too,' he breathes into the microphone.
Sam’s fridged Easter egg theorem I can probably hazard a guess.
The Brits have a proud tradition of the snarky omniscient narrator, and Love Island falls in line with some of the best. A disembodied Iain Stirling pokes gentle fun at the contestants as they potter about on the minefield of snogging, sometimes crossing the line into creepy perv. “Jessica’s ears are burning . . . her legs look pretty hot too,” he breathes into the microphone.
A similarly jarring element of Love Island is the flagrant amount of smoking — every gossip session is thoroughly lined with durries. It’s probably a testament to New Zealand that the casual plumes of smoke are now shocking to witness on local TV.
Despite what you may think of reality TV, there’s been an undeniable buzz around the latest season of Love Island online since it aired in the UK in July. It’s part soap opera, part social media sensation, part Big Brother in bathing suits. Now that it’s rolling out every night on TVNZ2, even my own father is texting me regular updates. Perhaps when there’s an ocean of peak TV available at our fingertips — all existential dread and murders
— it’s no surprise that even the strongest of swimmers wash up on the shores of Love Island every now and again.