The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘I finally tried Love Island…’
I like reality TV and the logistics of romance – so why did ‘Love Island’ leave me high and dry?
Victoria Coren Mitchell’s verdict.
Having enjoyed The Masked Singer last week, I thought I would stay in the realm of big ITV hits and watch the dating show Love Island. This was a mistake. It’s terrible.
There may simply be a generation gap, a cultural dissonance, an unfamiliarity problem. Having considered this: no. It’s terrible. Objectively terrible.
It would be more interesting if a column in The Telegraph said Love Island was wonderful rather than terrible. So I began the experiment keen to enjoy it. Like a bad scientist, I risked affecting the results with my own partisan hope. However, to the programme’s credit, it was terrible enough to cut through. The hope did not cloud my judgment, which was: “This is terrible.” It is of course possible that without the hope I would have found it worse. Although that’s hard to imagine.
Love Island is one of those huge cultural phenomena that have been hovering just outside my frame of reference for a couple of years, like Instagram and Mike Pence. They are noises I hear a lot, relating to concepts of which I have only the vaguest grasp.
(I’ve just googled Mike Pence. If I had seen that photo without a caption, I’d have thought it was Roger from Mad Men.)
Love Island is much written about, especially recently when its presenter Caroline Flack was arrested, charged with assault and dropped from the show. This seems unjust – we don’t know what happened during the incident and a trial is pending – but the precious principle of “innocent unless proven guilty” is complicated with TV presenters. It all hinges on luck anyway, so gossip alone can kill your career. As Mitchell and Webb once said in a radio sketch about the Blue Peter star John Leslie, “It turns out that ‘not having done a rape’ didn’t constitute sufficient charm to keep him on our screens.”
Anyway, it’s no use stagnating as the culture moves on, so my New Year’s resolutions included googling Mike Pence, browsing Instagram and watching Love Island. Luckily they also included eating more chocolate and taking longer baths, otherwise I’d be having a really miserable year.
I was expecting to enjoy Love
Island. I’m an erstwhile fan of reality TV and very interested in the logistics of romance. As regular readers will know, I think First Dates is one of the best shows on television.
I have plenty of unanswered questions about modern courtship. (For example: do people still go speed-dating? If so, do they call it something else? In the internet age, where singletons convey interest by glancing at a selfie and “swiping right”, five minutes’ chat must feel like an aeon. “Will it ever END?” they must wonder, rolling their eyes as they enter the second minute. “We’ve been talking for SEVENTY SECONDS! What is this, an ARRANGED MARRIAGE?”)
Unfortunately, Love Island does not answer any of these questions. It simply raises other questions, primarily: “Why is this programme so terrible?”
There are three big differences between First Dates and Love Island:
1. The social range. First Dates throws open a window on humankind, showing us old and young, rich and poor, readers and writhers, nerdy and cool. This is what Big Brother did in its gripping heyday, triggering a TV revolution. A few years in, BB became obsessed with a desire for the contestants to mate in captivity – to which end, suddenly everyone was 25 and feisty with big hair and skimpy clothes. There was no tension. There was no variety. It became unutterably dull, yet Love Island embraces this principle like a boa constrictor.
2. On First Dates, the artifice of a camera shows us an essentially real scenario, where lonely hearts get to know each other nervously over a meal. They seem to forget monitoring eyes as they talk about their life’s experience, their families, jobs and political opinions, disappointments and damage, hopes and dreams.
On Love Island, everything is artifice and the contestants are obsessed with it. They talk of nothing but the show itself. It was all “I wonder who’ll get picked for the next date”, “I don’t know how to dress for the date” and “I got coupled up with Connor but now I’m being coupled up with the other Connor”.
The only sentence in the entire programme that didn’t relate directly to the nuts and bolts of the format was the proclamation from one Bristolian contestant: “Sometimes I go to Cardiff just to visit the Disney shop.” I fell on it like a rat on a scrap. But it couldn’t sustain me for the hour.
Despite this, I still don’t understand what the format is. It seems to be an endless series of staged scenarios, and meandering analysis of those staged scenarios, that lead the players gradually into bed together. Never has the prospect of a penis going into a vagina seemed less worth the faff.
Love Island had been hovering just outside my frame of reference for years, like Mike Pence
3. First Dates reveals the humanity of its participants and, in so doing, appeals to ours. In its perfectly-paced demonstration of vulnerability and bruises, it makes us think more gently about our fellow man.
Love Island is the opposite. As the contestants rated each other according to looks, I found myself musing: “Of course, the twins aren’t as hot as the others. But I suppose the idea is to do them both at once.”
It is no mean feat to be simultaneously immoral and boring. This show literally made me a worse person. Marvellous. So now I’m terrible.