Flack’s death: Something must be done if 60 per cent of British reality Tv-related suicides are linked to one programme

On the Saturday after Valentine’s Day, one of Britain’s most famous TV presenters took her own life at 40 years old. I found out through Instagram, though the news of Caroline Flack’s suicide was everywhere. Flack’s life was “well documented” (as media sources seeking to sanitise her death have been saying).

I can’t pretend to know what led Flack to take her own life, nor will I try to. Rather, I will focus on what she was best known for, and how her death will affect its future.

Though she had been on a series of other reality shows, Flack’s biggest role was on ITV’S Love Island, a show in which glossy singletons sign up to seek love ( and, more recently, brand partnerships) in a Majorcan villa. Flack took on her archetypal role as presenter and with her help it became the UK’S most popular dating show.

More than any other show Love Island offers a voyeuristic take on the experience of falling in love. Indeed it almost feels illicit how close we get to the contestants of the show, which might more accurately be called “Stalking Hot Strangers’ Relationships”. We develop vested interests in them as individuals and as couples. Indeed the show hinges on how liked they are by us as viewers vote to keep or kick them off of the island.

Flack was the perfect presenter for the show, looking like an islander herself despite being nearly 20 years their senior. She demonstrated genuine care for the contestants as they exposed their innermost emotions to a cruel world – perhaps because she had done the same thing herself as a reality star.

Despite being synonymous with the show, Flack didn’t appear on the latest winter series of Love Island, following a recent assault charge. Her fall from grace affected an already souring public perception of the show, two of whose former cast members, Mike Thalassitis and Sophie Gradon, died by suicide following their appearance on it.

Yet when it comes to suicide, the show is not unique. In 2019, the Sun published a report stating 38 people worldwide have died by suicide since 1986 after appearing on reality TV (though interestingly, the paper’s report did not appear to affect the way it reported on the private life of Caroline Flack, but that’s another story).

In the UK, there have been five reality TV deaths by suicide, three of them connected to Love Island. If 60 per cent of reality Tv-related suicides are linked to one programme, surely something must be done. If not cancelled for good, at least for a single season, to give the show time to rethink its extreme framing and the intense scrutiny its contestants and its host are subject to.

Though Love Island seems to capture the islanders’ raw emotions, broadcasting them directly to the viewer, the reality is one of behind-the-scenes directing and purposefully withheld information. The show often uses dramatic irony, letting us know the reality while the islanders have been kept in the dark, like the highly popular returns from Casa Amor, in which islanders have to see if their partner stuck with them or chose another on a week they spend apart.

Now that dramatic irony is being used in a much darker way – they haven’t told the islanders about Flack’s death. The islanders aren’t allowed any news of the outside world – there’s likely a contract stipulating as much.

Yet watching the islanders now, they’ve been infantilised, like children too young to understand the complexities of death. I wonder how they’ll feel knowing they unwittingly engaged in playful banter in the wake of the suicide of the show’s presenter for five seasons.

Insisting the show must go on may have done it more harm than good.

Ratings have plummeted; a change.org petition calling for its cancellation has garnered a quarter of a million signatures. Yet this outpouring of public scorn may be a clarifying moment for the show. Perhaps the turn in public opinion against Love Island will finally prompt its producers at ITV to realise that for the show to go on, it must treat its contestants with the same love it expects them to show one another.