Yes, Love Island is addictive, but I still loathe it
Here comes Love island, the telly hit of the summer, the eight- week long celebration of love and romance under a hot Mediterranean sun, complete with lashings of prosecco and kisses.
oh, how i’d love to love Love island — but i can’t. i just can’t. To its three million viewers on iTV2, Love island is just one great big ice cream dollop of sexy fun, stuck on a crazy cone of romance. This dating show celebrates the meeting of minds (tiny!) and bodies (kapow!) of fit, hot young people who are determined to have a good time — and get off with each other as quickly as possible.
Apparently more people applied to go on the show this year than applied for oxbridge, and it even won a Bafta for best reality show last month. And despite being aimed at dopey millennials it is also popular with the hip middle classes; those viewers who fondly enjoy a bit of amusing tattooed rough along with their fresh pasta suppers and glasses of fruity red. People like george osborne adore Love island, and they like to confess their guilty addiction to this pile of trash publicly. cool or what?
Yet to me — sound the party pooper trumpet! — it is morally bankrupt, totally without artistic or aspirational merit, a Fake Bake fleapit featuring half-naked, dim-as- cheese twentysomethings who would happily snog a jellyfish if it meant furthering their chances in this dispiriting show.
You don’t have to be talented or gifted or funny or smart to be a contestant — you just have to look good in beachwear. end of.
The story so far. The initial 11 singles are ensconced in a villa in Mallorca, where all are trying to find true love and win the £50,000 prize money at the end of the series. They have to couple up or clear out, and the last man and woman standing wins after viewers have had their say.
The women wear swimsuits and high heels and parade around like contestants in the kind of beauty contests that i thought were banned. The men are in trunks and wear veneered teeth of phantasmagorical brightness.
The women spend all their time talking about the men and who they want to get off with, while the men talk about their teeth, and since you can’t take your eyes off their lavish dentistry, you can hardly blame them.
Jack, who sells pens for a living, is particularly proud of his. ‘i went all the way to Turkey to get these,’ he said. i imagine a shop in a souk, selling tiny stick- on neon tiles. And Jack saying: ‘i’ll take the lot’, before flying back to essex on a magic carpet, pleased.
The conversations are as scintillating as you might expect. ‘i don’t really use big words,’ says hayley, a model from Liverpool who doesn’t understand what ‘ superficial’ means. ‘ i am so nervous i want to pee,’ says kendall, a shoe shop assistant from Blackpool.
Laura is an air hostess from Scotland with a predatory gleam in her eye, Samira wants you to know she is a West end musical performer, while essex barmaid Dani wastes no time in letting slip that eastenders actor Danny Dyer is her father.
What does niall, a student from coventry, think of this bevy of babes? ‘They are like the girls on instagram,’ he says, the highest compliment of the millennial world. Later he showed off his harry Potter tattoos to kendall, who professed herself a huge wizarding fan. What was her favourite film? She couldn’t remember. god, they are just kids, aren’t they?
Fans of the show claim that the relationships that develop between the islanders are fascinating from an anthropological point of view, and that is indeed true.
When a 6ft 5in hunk called Adam appears, the men fret and paw the ground like a herd of worried elk. Meanwhile, Laura’s eyes flit over his apple-sized abs with the expertise of a seasoned elk hunter. Doors to manual and cross-check, she’s probably got landing lights on her thighs.
And yes, the interaction, the jealousies and the mating rituals that unfold are all quite gripping, showing that we — they! — are not as evolved as we might think.
And this might really shock you, but what did emerge from Love island is that if a hot-blooded man is asked to choose a woman from a line-up of beauties, he will, almost without exception, always choose the blonde with the big boobs. i know. incredible, isn’t it?
The worst thing about Love island is that it begins where other dating reality shows end. The trip abroad, the shared bedroom, the holiday vibe, the snogging? in more innocent shows such as First Dates (c4) and Take Me out (iTV) that is the final chapter, not the first.
on Love island, contestants just expect to be snogging and perhaps even sleeping together without delay — one girl admitted that she was looking forward to it. A few episodes in, and already there has been more slurping than at an ice-cream eating competition.
niall and kendall hit it off early on. Laura is a chancer. Adam is playing a game and hayley is as dumb as a rock, but so sweet. oh no! Please don’t make me start caring about these people — except to feel sorry for them. For like the contestants on Big Brother and i’m A celebrity, the poor dolts are cynically manipulated and served up as entertainment so that everyone from teenagers to urban sophisticates like our former chancellor can laugh at their peeling hearts as they try to find love, or even a word they can understand, under the sun.
george osborne might feel that it is harmless entertainment — but it chills my soul.