Are there any depths they won’t plumb on DEPRAVITY TV
As the sleaziest batch of reality shows yet bombard our teenagers with on-screen sex, vile language and even full-frontal nudity, a horrified feminist and mother asks...
IMAGINE the scene. Your twentysomething son comes home with three of his friends, each with girls they have just met, and they announce they are all going upstairs to his bedroom to have sex. At the same time. Obviously it doesn’t happen. But turn on your TV and you’ll find it is happening – every night at 9pm on a reality TV show called Love Island. The finale tomorrow is the most anticipated event of the season, where Camilla Thurlow, a trained bombdisposal expert, is the favourite for being one half of the couple proving themselves as most ‘in love’. Or, the most impressive at having sex.
I watched the programme last week and strangely I found myself thinking of an old story set in a school playground in Shropshire in 1963. A school mistress is horrified to find her young pupils mimicking sexual intercourse. Where had they learnt such behaviour, asks the formidable figure? The children answer: they were imitating something they had seen on television.
From that moment on, the teacher, Mary Whitehouse, was on a mission to save the country and its children from what she saw as a downward spiral in broadcasting standards.
You can’t begin to imagine what she would have thought of Love Island, one of the current crop of reality shows featuring naked couples writhing around in dormitories under the all-seeing eye of infrared cameras.
Invariably, as is hoped by producers and viewers alike, it all ends in tears. Following one unfortunate episode, the reigning Miss Great Britain left sobbing and in disgrace after discovering that fornicating on live television had lost her the title. Who knew, dear, who knew?
When I was young, the only people I remember seeing sharing a bedroom were Morecambe and Wise and George and Mildred – and there was certainly no sex there.
This passion for watching people exposed in intimate and private moments for entertainment was started in 2000 by Big Brother, a sort Lord Of The Flies with prosecco. But 17 years on and it’s a much more sordid affair. On Channel 4’s Naked Attraction, women choose a date after being shown a contestant’s penis. Men then choose their date by looking at breasts and vaginas. I can’t believe I’ve just written those sentences – or that this series is allowed to be broadcast.
These shows are all noxious, so much so that I feel tempted to take up Mary’s baton myself. What can be entertaining about watching the degradation of women as they fight to keep at the top of a slippery pole going nowhere (quite literally, in some cases)?
Yet tomorrow’s final will be watched by many of my friends, all of whom I think of as erudite, sensitive, well-educated people. They listen to the Today programme, have impressive libraries stacked full of the classics (which they have read) but they watch what really is mind-boggling, terrible, sickening TV.
It’s also remarkably stupid television. In one episode, one of the Love Island ‘characters’, Adam, asked his new buddy Sophie what the Lake District was. She said she wasn’t sure, but thought it was ‘a district with lots of lakes’. Shouldn’t she be encouraged to get out of bed and go back to school?
The winners of Love Island will be the couple deemed to be ‘most in love’ and their reward is £50,000. They just have to convince the judges and the goggleeyed public. However, if someone is prepared to risk the chance of their mother seeing them having sex in a room alongside three other couples, then they are prepared to do and say anything. Last year’s winning couple, Cara and Nathan, shared the prize money, then split up, but not before she had got pregnant.
At the time, Cara said that she loved Nathan because he accepted her for what she was and the feeling was mutual. ‘I brushed his teeth the other day because he was so drunk.’ That is simply not a good look for a father-to-be.
How times have changed. In the late 1980s, the alternative comedian Ben Elton successfully led a campaign to have Benny Hill and his ‘Yakety Sax’ theme tune removed from the nation’s TV screens because of the degradation of women.
Elton’s demands were supported by the strongest of feminist voices, and he denounced Hill as a ‘dirty old man, tearing the clothes off nubile girls while chasing them round a park’. But the girls were fairly well covered and actresses playing a part – they also chased him. It was much more Carry On than Come to Bed.
So where are the cries of outrage now, Ben? After all, the female contestants on both Love
Island and Naked Attraction are at the mercy of the nation’s casting couch. It’s they, more than the men, who receive the highest negative feedback on social media, and who are judged most harshly on their body shape.
As a young student in the 1980s, I used to go on enthusiastic marches and chant: ‘Yes means yes, no means no; however we dress, wherever we go.’ We were fighting for the right to wear trousers if we wanted to, or short skirts of course, but still to be measured as equals.
I don’t think any of us thought it would materialise with the ‘liberation’ of women to the point that they would appear naked in a line-up on primetime TV, awkwardly waiting to be picked out by a man for debased sexual coupling in front of the cameras. That is not liberation. That is just sad and pathetic. Make of that sentence what you will. I know that I constantly fear that my young daughter will see this gross, grim behaviour and think that is normal.
Mary Whitehouse was not a saint. Her views on same-sex relationships were misguided to say the least – anyone has the right to do what they want in their own home with another consenting adult. That fight was won long ago, and this year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Act that eventually allowed for same-sex love. The country is better for it.
But there is no love on Love Island. The naked truth is that it should be renamed Loathe Island.