The Doomsday Clock is close to midnight, so park the guilt and just enjoy ‘Love Island’
FRIENDS, come with me now as I chart a course directly into the all-consuming cultural maelstrom that is ‘Love Island’. It shames me to admit that up to this series, I had never seen a single sleazy second of it, but this year I couldn’t avoid it.
A co-worker who spends much of his time rhapsodising Ken Burns documentaries declared it to be the best TV he had seen in years. And so it was that Is at down with a cynical sneer across my face, ready to archly tell anyone listening of how the tricoteuses of the French Revolution knitted while heads rolled down from the guillotines.
This is the death of the intellect, I mused, as I navigated the uncharted, shallower channels of my Sky box. “Here be ITVs,” I chuckled to myself.
Except, of course, I was soon high on ‘Love Island’s’ heady mix of social awkwardness, emotional frailty, and a cast that looks like it was designed by Mattel. They have Barbies, they have Ken dolls, and they had Kendall, who looked like a Bratz doll and cried like a Tiny Tears, and thus was marched off the show for bringing everyone down.
It is like a soap opera set in an Irish college – people with varying degrees of competence at their own native tongue attempt to get the shift, with mixed results.
It’s ‘I’m A Celebrity’, only instead of eating kangaroo anus, they are eating each other’s faces, and it is almost as horrifying.
High points so far reveal that Alex is actually 22, despite looking thirtysomething. It would appear he has been cursed by the gods with incredible beauty and the lifespan of a mayfly. And who can forget supremely woke
Eeyore (not his real name) whose then-soulmate forgot his name and said the sound of his breathing made her sick. His reaction caused his zen facade to fall asunder and he became most unchill. What a show.
But like all reality shows, the best part of ‘Love Island’ is the schadenfreude.
It is a show that makes me glad to be old, doughy and married and thus ineligible for residency on ‘Love Island’, or any landmass associated with love, be it peninsula, promontory or landfill. As with all reality programmes, pundits are queueing up to tell you ‘Love Island’ is a symptom of our cultural decline, as though up until Endemol vomited the first season of ‘Big Brother’ onto our screens we all sat around reading ‘Ulysses’ and listening to Rachmaninoff. You can watch it for swimwear tips, to ponder on the human condition, laugh at the contestants or with them, or just kill an hour after a long day of worrying about your deteriorating finances and health.
Sure it’s bubblegum TV, but as the doomsday clock ticks closer to midnight, it’s nice to have something to wash away the bitter taste of fear. Much of that fear is now obviously unfounded, as this week the real ‘Love Island’ was Singapore, where the will-they-won’t-they Mexican nuke-off between Trump and Kim came to a bromantic conclusion.
One is a deranged egomaniac who controls the media and propagates lies with every breath, the other is a North Korean dictator. What on earth could they have in common, apart from crazy hair, crazy ideas and a penchant for bizarre pet names for each other – ‘dotard’ and ‘little rocket man’ being two.
Hey, you two, get a room – perhaps in the five-star Trump Hotel Pyongyang that is no doubt looming in our future.