Dim? I’m a Love Island genius!
Yes, we flaunt our bodies, kiss for the cameras, bitch for Britain and know more about Kim Kardashian than Kim Jong Un. But, says the queen of TV’s most vacuous reality show, we’re FAR from stupid – and here’s why...
DI MWITS, they’ re all dimwits ,’ bemoaned Piers Morgan on Good Morning Britain as he to re into the cast of ITV2’s Love Island after The Mail on Sunday reported last week that contestant Hayley Hughes, 21, hadn’t heard of Brexit.
Cue an outpouring of despair from anyone over the age of 50 about so-called millennials – which as far as I can make out is anyone who is younger than them.
Apparently we’re stupid – a recent survey claimed IQ is getting lower with each generation. We’re poorly educated – as if we chose t he national curriculum. And we’ re generally clueless about life.
Well, I’m afraid our critics need to wise up. We’re not as dumb as you think. I’m sure most people cringed when Hayley asked: ‘Brexit, what’s that? I seriously don’t have a clue.’ But did you ever stop to wonder whether she said it for entertainment value and airtime?
Because t hat’s what Love Island is all about. The show is a modern-day version of Blind Date, where ten people are paired up in a posh villa in Majorca and the public vote to decide which couple win the show – and the £50,000 prize money.
When I appeared on, and won, Love Island last year, critics said we were ‘thick, stupid and vacuous’. But do you know what? Thanks to the show, many of my fellow contest ants are already well on the way to becoming millionaires.
No wonder more than 85 ,000 people applied to go on Love Island this year – more than applied to Oxbridge. I can’t blame them. I know so many university graduates who have got crippling debts and either can’t get a job or else earn so little that they can barely pay their bills. Besides, we’re not all cut out for university. I’m intelligent but not necessarily ‘book smart’. I got 12 GCSEs and moved to London aged 16 to study performing arts.
For me, Love Island was a nobrainer. I filled out the application form and underwent numerous auditions and interviews where they were looking for people who stood out from the crowd.
It’s given me an amazing platform – I had 5,000 Instagram followers when I went on the show and now
have 1.7 million – and allowed me to make my living from social media.
It will be the same for this year’s contestants, such as Dani Dyer – the daughter of actor Danny Dyer – who has already got 587,000 followers. I don’t pretend to know a lot about politics and I didn’t vote in the Brexit referendum because I didn’t feel I knew enough about it.
I decided that making an uneducated vote wasn’t a helpful vote.
But a lot of people of my age are becoming more engaged with poli- tics – and social media is partly responsible for that. I’ll definitely be voting next time.
What the oldies fail to realise is that social media is central to the way my generation looks at the world. Middle- aged critics may snigger at the way we preen and pose for the cameras – on the show we’ve seen the girls blow-drying their clip-on hair extensions and Adam Collard flexing his muscles shamelessly by the pool.
But out in the real world, a single post on social media can earn big fees and influence millions.
Because of social media, I know about Kim Jong Un’s meeting with Donald Trump last week, but he wasn’t the only Kim to meet t he President. And rightly or wrongly, I’m more interested in Kim Kardashian than the North Korean leader.
She’s probably the most famous woman in the world right now and a social media powerhouse with 112 million followers on Instagram (a kind of photographic record of your life, for those wondering).
I have enormous amount of respect for Kim, who used her status to secure the release of Alice Marie Johnson, a first-time offender who has been in jail for more than 20 years for selling cocaine to feed her family.
Because of Kim, an ordinary woman who had been forgotten by the American justice system suddenly came to the attention of the President of the United States. I, too, want to build a business from my social media platform, but your whole life is out there so you have to have a thick skin. That serves the Love Island contestants well, too. Hayley may have been ridiculed for being clueless about Brexit but she stood her ground when Eyal screamed at her for leading him on last week. That takes guts. I suspect the most vocal critics of Love Island have never actually watched the show, dismissing it as a bunch of thick show-offs having sex – and, yes, they do have sex in front of the cameras. But it’s far more than that. It’s a story following the ups and downs people experience in relationships that everyone can relate to. It’s real, it won a Bafta award, and 3 million people are tuning in. Yes, it can sometimes be racy with girls lounging around in skimpy bikinis, but it’s entertainment. After all, no one complains when viewers ogle Aidan Turner’s bare chest on Poldark, and that’s supposed to be a family show. Winning Love Island has changed my life completely, but with social media I’ll have to keep my finger on the pulse. And a university degree or intimate knowledge about Brexit won’t help me with that.
Poldark takes off his shirt – and no one complains