‘I’ve made idiots into millionaires’

Iain Stirling’s witty narration made ‘Love Island’ the TV hit of the summer. Now its fans are flocking to his show at the Fringe. Rupert Hawksley meets him

Iain Stirling has been performing stand-up comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe for six consecutive years. But this time around things have been very different. Previously, the 29-year-old would have been happy just to sell enough tickets not to bankrupt himself for the month. This year, his show, U OK Hun? X, sold out long before the festival had even started. Indeed, due to the overwhelming demand for tickets, extra shows were added at another venue five times the size. There were queues snaking around the block for these, too.

So what happened? In short: Love Island happened. The ITV2 reality show, in which beautiful people head to Majorca to couple up with each other, has been the television sensation of the year. Earlier this summer, almost every night for seven weeks, an average of 2.52million people tuned in to watch. And a key part of the show’s appeal has been Stirling’s winning voice-over, which is innuendo-laden, giddily excited and often nicely acerbic. Stirling has been narrating Love Island since it started two years ago but it was only this year that the show really caught the public’s imagination. Everyone from Liam Gallagher and grime artist Stormzy, to former England cricket captain Michael Vaughan, admitted to tuning in.

To give you further evidence of its impact, there have already been more applications for the next series of Love Island than for places at Oxford and Cambridge. “Well, there are more job prospects after Love Island,” jokes Stirling, when we meet in Edinburgh for a recuperative cup of tea, midway through his Fringe run, him having staggered home at 5am.

When his agent put him forward for the Love Island job, Stirling was getting the odd gig on the stand-up comedy circuit, while also working as a children’s TV presenter on shows including CBBC’S The Dog Ate My Homework.

“I didn’t want to do it at first,” he says. “I thought the broadsheets and Radio 4 wouldn’t take me seriously if I was the voice of a reality TV show. Ironically, that is now the reason why these people want to talk to me.” He wasn’t an immediate hit, though. Stirling tells me that he was very nearly sent home after the first few weeks of series one. “The boss was like, ‘this makes no sense, it’s rubbish, why is he being weird?’” Fortunately, one of the executives fought to keep him on and it’s that very “weirdness” which has proved to be so popular – particularly the way he cheekily sends up the whole concept of reality TV, highlighting its artifice and manipulative tactics.

Whatever the formula is, it has catapulted Stirling into the big time. He says he now wears a hat whenever he leaves the house, in order to stop Love Island fans asking him for photographs – though mostly, in fact, they only recognise him when he opens his mouth.

He is not, however, complaining. “Obviously there has been a different audience coming to my show this year,” Stirling says. “I don’t know how many people come thinking I’m going to do an hour about Love Island. [But] hopefully 70 per cent of the people go, ‘oh wow, that’s actually really cool what he does’.” U OK Hun? X, a popular phrase among millennials, is an extremely funny hour of observational and surreal comedy, which owes much to Stirling’s comic inspirations, former Edinburgh comedy award winner Russell Kane and new Bake Off host Noel Fielding. In the show, Stirling laments gentrification and rising house prices, slams dinner parties and asks when all his friends settled down, or as he puts it, became “f------ boring”.

For his generation, then, everything is not OK at all, hun. “In 2005, I remember being told that I could get a job wherever I wanted,” Stirling says.

“And then the credit crunch happened and it was like, ‘yeah, you might want to re-think that.’ Then you’ve got the social media element on top of that, where everyone’s portraying their life as absolutely perfect. Even the generation [below] us all came out and voted. They’re incredible. Whereas we were all ASBOS and ‘hug a hoodie’. I don’t think there’s anything about our generation, where you’re like, ‘oh that’s positive’.” But don’t worry, the show is not all doom and gloom. Stirling has made plenty of concessions to Love Island fans. What struck me watching it was just how scathing Stirling is about the contestants. “I have made idiots into millionaires,” he says at one point.

I ask him about this. Stirling is in more generous spirits. “I like that the contestants are doing well,” he says. “It’s just funny to be angry about it.” For all his voice-over wisecracks, Stirling is not cynical about the show as a whole, and thinks the reason it works so well is because what we see of the contestants is mostly sincere.

“I can’t imagine any of them keeping up any sort of falsity for seven weeks, especially when you throw relationships into the mix. It would be a very clever person that managed that and I don’t think I’ve met one that clever yet. You look at Kem [Cetinay] and think, ‘could he really have had a seven-week game plan in his head?’

“When two new girls arrived at the villa – it was Gabby [Allen] and Tyne-lexy [Clarson], I think – it was the day after the general election and the producers said to them, ‘talk about what you want but don’t mention any sort of big events that have happened recently.’ They were both like, ‘what?’. And the producers just said, ‘forget it, forget we said anything’.”

Stirling is cracking company, every bit as amusing in real life as you’d hope, his thoughts firing out in mini explosions, like popcorn in a microwave. The hyper voice you hear on television is toned down in person, replaced by a more laconic lilt. “Where I come from, everyone talks like me,” he says of his thick accent. “It’s working-class Edinburgh.”

That self-description might need a wee pinch of salt. Stirling’s father worked for a law firm and his mother still works as a researcher at Edinburgh Law School.

Before he landed his first job in television (he was picked out after performing in a stand-up competition), Stirling attended Edinburgh University to also study law. He did graduate but only just; his grades dropped off a cliff when he discovered comedy. “I probably wouldn’t be doing comedy,” he says, “if it wasn’t for the fact that I was doing stand-up and getting a few gigs, while I was also applying for law internships and getting absolutely nothing.”

Plenty of people have tried to analyse Love Island’s popularity but when I put to Stirling the suggestion that it is, in fact, just class voyeurism

– a chance for the wealthy to have a good old gawp at the working class

– he is dismissive. “I just don’t think it rings true,” he says. “Everyone watches the show, it’s not a middleclass audience and it’s not a workingclass thing to go on holiday and pull people.” The only snobbery, he says, comes from the older generation looking down their noses at what “the youth” are watching and asking, “that’s how you live your life now?!”

As for the next series, Stirling tells me that he hasn’t spoken to anyone at ITV2 yet but hopes to be a part of the show for some time to come. “I can’t imagine I’d not do it. I’d love to do it,” he says. Does it worry him that he might forever be known as the guy from Love Island? “Actually,” Stirling says,

“it feels nice to be doing something you know other people couldn’t do.”

And who knows? Between

Love Island and his increasingly illustrious stand-up career, he might turn out to be the voice (over) of a generation.

‘I didn’t want to do Love Island because I thought the broadsheets wouldn’t take me seriously. But now it’s the reason they want to talk to me’