‘I want TV back from the teens so I can watch er, something, tasteful’
There are some things as a parent that you would rather your children didn’t do. Love Island is one of them. Watching it, that is. Going on it would be even worse.
If mine ever auditioned for the TV dating reality show currently taking Britain’s youth by storm I’d cut them out of their inheritance.
As that’s currently running at a credit card bill and a mortgage, maybe they will be tempted to rip off their clothes, along with all their body hair, and attempt to make it big on Love Island?
In case you missed it, Love Island is a place in Majorca where young people pretend to find a partner in the full glare of the television cameras – cameras which are all too often pointed at pert derrières and ripped muscles.
In truth, Love Island is about self -obsessed, over-oiled bodies trying to find fame and fortune rather than love.
If you haven’t watched it look away now. If you haven’t heard of it – where have you been?
My initiation came when the latest series started a few weeks ago. Just as I was patting myself on the back for having “the chat about online porn with the teenagers” I caught them watching it on the main television screen with the curtains open for all the street to see.
“Turn that off now,” I shrieked, pulling the curtains together as a group of teenagers – some known to me, some not – squinted at me from the sofa.
“It’s only Love Island,” they chorused, as semi-clad bodies heaved about on screen.
In the interests of understanding what my teenagers are doing and watching I poured a reviving pint of tea and settled down with them to try to work out which bits of the bodies I was watching were real and which fake.
If you thought standing in line being picked last for the school netball team felt bad, it has nothing on Love Island
I cringed as I watched a group of male contestants pick a line of women contestants they fancied until the last was unceremoniously kicked off the show.
As it whittled down to the last two they clutched each other for support. It was like Hunger Games without the killing – but who knows where TV reality may go next?
The woman booted off was a solicitor from Wales. One of the men who didn’t pick her was a doctor from Wales.
Dr Alex George is 27, from Carmarthen, and works in accident and emergency. Rhondda’s Rosie Williams is a 26-year-old qualified lawyer and bikini model.
I spat my tea out. “Why isn’t everyone choosing the doctor and the solicitor? Surely they will have the best brains and income?,” I ask the teens, who are glued to the screen.
They stare at me as if I am insane. Selection on Love Island is about who has the best-plucked eyebrows and whose lips look like baboons’ backsides. Maybe that’s no worse than going for cash and conversation?
I am trying to work out how the woman from Wales is feeling at this humiliating mass rejection and how she manages to see through her incredibly long false eye lashes. How she keeps them in place while swimming is another mystery.
The makers of Love Island have been accused of coercing young working-class people into having onscreen sex for the vague chance of a short-lived reality star career and of getting them drunk while they do it.
Neither is wholly fair. I’m not sure how working class is defined officially – is it denoted by accent, income or profession? Either way, all types are represented.
On the alcohol, apparently they are only permitted two glasses of alcohol a session, which seems cruel to me, given the gravity of the situation.
If I was being lined up for sex on TV, or paraded like a piece of meat at a selection market, I’d want to down at least two bottles of Lambrini. And that would be with a mouthful of sun cream chaser so I could throw up all over the people who rejected me. Nothing like a bit of puking on TV to get maximum social media coverage.
At its crudest, Love Island is just a fun bit of TV candy where pretty young things lie by the pool and bitch about one another as they try to cop off for possible fame and fortune.
But if you scratch away a spec of the perma tan it’s all pretty disturbing stuff.
Contestants vote not only on who should stay on the show, but who should go on a date and who should spend the night alone together. When it’s all over the happy couple return to spill the beans – that’s after you, as the viewer, have been treated to the vision of bodies moving under a duvet cover.
Contestants have to be made of stern stuff to take the implied psychological abuse as they are wooed and dumped, or never wooed at all, under the full spotlight of television cameras mercilessly recording the whole shebang.
It’s like teenagers being mean on social media with knobs on. It makes all those likes being chased by 14 year-olds on Facebook seem decidedly benign.
“Oh, you’re taking it all too seriously,” I can hear my teenagers and their friends chant.
Maybe. Perhaps a group of TV reality contestants with such crashingly dull conversation should indeed not be taken seriously.
Maybe they are impervious to this level of personal scrutiny as they hunt for a mate?
All I do know is that I’d like the main TV screen back so I can watch Poldark in peace (ripped chest, better script).
Aren’t teenagers all supposed to watch TV on their phones and laptops these days?
While I’m watching Ross rising bare-chested from the waves as Demelza’s bosom heaves, the teens can mend the curtain rail which I broke in my haste to prevent the neighbours seeing the trash they’re watching.
Sex on TV? You’d never catch me watching that.
■ Love Island continues on Sunday night on ITV2 at 9pm.