‘I think they will get married eventually’
Judith Woods was an unlikely middle-class viewer of reality TV show Love Island. Here she finds out what the winner’s parents made of it all
Can it really be less than a week since the Love Island finale? Just five days since Kem and Amber ascended to the ranks of Reality TV royalty? Record audiences tuned in to ITV2 to see the frisky couple win the coveted title and £50,000 cash after viewers voted for them to be crowned top couple. The impressive viewing figures, it must be noted, were achieved in no small part by the unlikely following the show developed among the chattering classes. Not only was it rendered acceptable – nay, crucial – viewing by A-list endorsements from the likes of Liam Gallagher, Adele and assorted British and Irish Lions rugby stars, but it was also deemed worthy of discussion on
Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4.
I’m not sure how any of us ended up watching a show predicated on young people in incy wincy bikinis, covered in tattoos gamboling with one another in the sun, but in the past few weeks we did so in droves – viewing figures for the final peaked at 2.9million – making it the breakout hit of the summer. I, for one, can say hand on heart I found the show to be a revelation.
Admittedly, it was with some reluctance and much scepticism that I initially settled down to watch with my 15-year-old daughter who assured me it was awesome. The premise – a dozen-strong co-ed group of improbably beautiful young people hooking up in a Balearic villa, or, in their own parlance, “sticking it on” one another – did not sound like the kind of thing she should be watching. But after one episode I was hooked.
At first it was for anthropological reasons – honest. Thereafter it was because I was genuinely interested in the group dynamics. And finally I actually started caring about the individuals whose emotions (and, yes, toned, tanned torsos) were laid so bare over seven weeks.
What happened after they left the villa will be revealed in tomorrow night’s Love Island: The Reunion when we discover how Kem and Amber, Chris and Olivia, Camilla and Jamie and Marcel and Gabby have fared back in Britain. If, like me, you have invested emotionally in the programme, you genuinely do care.
One thing I can confirm already is that Amber Davies, the pretty, doll-like dancer from North Wales, and Kem Cetinay, the sunny, funny hairdresser from the South-east, are still entirely smitten, if slightly strung-out by the cameras and the constant media whirl.
“It’s been mental,” says Kem, 21, throwing himself into an armchair in Amber’s mum and dad’s pin-neat modern terrace in the medieval market town of Denbigh, where the couple stayed the night before. “I wouldn’t change a single moment of it for the world but busy doesn’t begin to describe it.”
Kem is every bit as effortlessly charming and unmediated in the flesh as he was on screen, but my excitement at meeting the people I’ve spent so long watching this summer is matched by my curiosity about whence they came. How, I want to know, does a parent cope with seeing their child captured in the glare of a reality TV show – and watching them consummate a relationship (repeatedly) on prime time? Piers Morgan must have
‘How does a parent cope seeing their child captured in the glare of a reality TV show’
Jeff Bezos strolled past the lawns at the Sun Valley resort in Idaho looking every bit the master of the universe at play. Shaved head, black polo T-shirt, blue gilet, jeans, sunglasses. Despite the other big names in attendance at the annual jamboree for the world’s media and technology glitterati – Oprah Winfrey and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, to name but two – Bezos stood out.
Not, for once, because of Amazon, his multi-faceted technology empire, which sells everything from books to bread.
Nor because he is in the middle of an audacious £10.5billion bid for supermarket chain Whole Foods. No, because of his chiselled biceps. The internet lit up within minutes of the pictures of him entering the high-powered Sun Valley conference appeared. “Pretty sure Bezos gets more ripped the richer he gets,” commented one admirer on Twitter.
Another placed the picture next to one of the 53-year-old entrepreneur from the early days of Amazon in 1998, replete with wispy receding hairline, awkward smile, fading fawn jumper, and slightly arched back.
“I sell books,” read a fictional quote positioned under the old snap. “I sell whatever the f--- I want,” read the latest shot.
The image is an allegory for Bezos’s place in the world, having crossed over from everyday business geek into popular culture.
On Thursday, he became the world’s richest man. Albeit for a matter of hours, the wealth of the Amazon pioneer was greater than
Influential businessmen: Warren Buffett, below left, and Bill Gates
that of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, according to US business magazine Forbes.
But, unlike Gates, Bezos doesn’t fit the mould of your average billionaire. When I became one of the few journalists to interview him two summers ago, he was every bit the lovable nerd. That weekend, he had been to see Mission Impossible 5 at the cinema with wife Mackenzie and their four kids. “It’s terrific,” he recalled, laughing heartily.
We met in a room in “Day One”, one of the 30-or-so buildings which house the 20,000-plus Amazon staff who call Seattle home.
He has almost single-handedly overseen the dramatic regeneration of the American city’s South Lake Union district, encouraging housing to be built that allows all employees to walk to work.
He has even built a shop downtown which allows staff to pick up hot food without paying for it – an early trial of a system where customers can choose items and be charged afterwards.
He is also funding a giant series of biodomes in the city centre – a type of urban Eden Project – to allow his staff a place to relax around plants and greenery in a city where weather is no better than that of your average British seaside town.
But for a man who has changed the face of retail, and many other industries to boot, Bezos was disarmingly friendly and down-toearth. The building was called Day One, he explained, because he wants every day to feel like the first, bringing that entrepreneurial spirit; a spirit he continues to embody.
“These are very humble roots, I can assure you,” he told me at the time. “When we started out, I drove the packages to the post office in my Chevy Blazer myself… I had a grand vision that one day we might be able to afford a forklift.”
But what may have begun in 1994 as a company focused on selling books on the internet quickly turned into a gigantic corporate octopus with tentacles reaching out in a variety of, at times, disparate areas – but always with the same principles: to disrupt and to dominate. Within three years of the website’s launch, it had started selling CDS and DVDS. Two years later, toys and electronics. Within 10 years of launch, it had begun selling food. Within 15 years, it was making television programmes.
Today, Amazon is worth just shy of $490billion – Bezos’s near-17 per cent stake in it forms the bulk of his sizeable wealth – and it generates hundreds of billions of dollars of sales each year from its own retail operations, selling on behalf of others, and its giant web-hosting business.
Whatever its employees focus on, however – Bezos is keen all staff operate as if they’re working in a start-up, constantly coming up with new ideas – Amazon is driven by a number of defining principles.
One: the two-pizza rule. No meeting should ever have more people in it than could eat two pizzas.
Two: no bullet points. All Powerpoint presentations are banned.
Three: this is not about profit. Amazon didn’t make a full year profit until 2004 – 10 years after it started – and since then has continued to have a distant relationship with the word. Bezos would prefer to invest to create new markets and build scale rather than return money to shareholders.
When we talked, he explained why he’s not focused on making money: “Wall Street… is not one thing. The investment community is made up of thousands and thousands of investors with different philosophies. As long as you’re clear about what you’re trying to build, and why, I think investors opt in. And the ones who don’t like that approach opt out.” His desire not to pander to investors is reflective of his views in other areas. While Gates and octogenarian investor Warren Buffett have led a tidal wave of billionaires pledging the vast majority of their riches to charity, Bezos does things differently. Although his parents have their own eponymous foundation, the man himself prefers to look at for-profit projects which can bring about social change.
In 2013, he bought The Washington Post. “I didn’t know anything about the newspaper business. But I did know something about the internet,” he said in an interview about his $250 million purchase, which has strengthened financially and editorially since he took it on. In 2000, he founded Blue Origin, a private space flight business which he hopes will one day deliver commercial flights.
That’s not all. A month ago, he asked his 312,000 Twitter followers for philanthropic ideas that deliver immediate results. To date, he has 47,000 suggestions. And counting.
Similarly, unlike most entrepreneurs who tend not to veer too far from the industry they start off in, Bezos sees no boundaries as to what he or Amazon can become involved in. A modern-day Rockefeller? Maybe. But Bezos is Bezos. There is nobody like him. He may not be the world’s richest man today, but that isn’t what matters to him. He wants Amazon to be all-pervading, all-dominant, in the fields in which he chooses to operate.
In so many ways, it already is.
For a matter of hours, the Amazon pioneer’s wealth was greater than that of Bill Gates