Love Island: “appallingly watchable”

“There was only one story in town this week,” said Ayesha Hazarika in The Guardian. ITV2’S Love Island, the surprise hit of the summer, reached its finale on Monday night. Some 2.43 million viewers – a record for the channel – tuned in to see Kem, a hairdresser from Romford, and Amber, a dancer from North Wales, crowned the winning couple. “Not since George Galloway donned a leotard, got on all fours and purred, ‘Shall I be the cat?’, has there been so much interest in a reality television show.” If you’ve been living under a rock for the past two months, the premise is this, said Emine Saner in The Observer: “a group of implausibly taut young people, most of them the colour of a digestive biscuit”, are put up in a Mallorcan villa. They are encouraged to couple up; and then have to convince the viewers to keep them on the show in weekly voting rounds. The last couple standing win the prize, of £50,000.

In short, “Love Island puts young men and women in a villa and invites them to have sex”, said Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph. “The more sex they have, the more likely they are to win. So it’s The Krypton Factor with Hep B.” The passion for turning people’s intimate moments into TV entertainment began with Big Brother in 2000, said Sam Taylor in The Mail on Sunday. But 17 years on, reality TV has reached a “sordid” new low.

The show may be “manipulative” and “crass”, but it’s not grubby or explicit, said Ben Macintyre in The Times. And it’s “appallingly, compulsively watchable”. As “an anthropological experiment, it is quite remarkable”. The islanders create their own primitive society, complete with mating rituals – the men “preen and posture”, while the women do the selection – and even have their own language. (To “mug someone off” is to make a fool of them; to be “pie-ed” is to be dumped.) I thought Love Island would be “exploitative and semi-pornographic”, said Caitlin Moran in the same paper. But in fact, it’s relatively low-key and realistic: a bit like going on a holiday as a teenager, where all you do is drink cider and talk about who you fancy. A retired colonel would certainly describe it as “truly appalling”, but as reality TV goes, the show provides innocent, good-natured escapism.