We’re all suckers when trying to find true love
Love Island is proving a huge TV ratings hit because it cuts to the very core of the human heart, writes Ciara O’Connor
SO 2017 has been a surprising year in many ways, but perhaps stranger than Trump, Brexit and novelty socks has been the unstoppable steamrolling force of Love Island.
This year, the reality TV show, in which a lot of sexy young personal trainers, models and dancers are sent to a tropical paradise and encouraged to ‘couple up’, has taken off in a completely unprecedented way.
The X Factor is haemorrhaging viewers and no one even knows that Big Brother is still on – and yet Love Island has been extended by a week because of its rocketing viewership.
Young, old, men, women, rich and poor are all, it seems, hooked on this new guilty pleasure of the chattering classes.
Liam Gallagher missed parts of Glastonbury to watch it. It’s being covered in broadsheets and gossip magazines write of little else. It’s safe to say that 2017 is truly the year of Love Island.
It’s difficult to explain the format, or even the aim of the game, because they’re pretty vague on that themselves. The ‘best’ couple (as voted for by the public) wins £50,000 at the end of it. I’m not sure what the criteria is — they seem to have to be convincing but not boring. Boring is the enemy of Love Island: the puppeteer producers do whatever they have to make good TV.
The show is essentially being run by a team of evil genius producers whose sole goal is to shit-stir.
They’ll organise games as a pretext for telling islanders what others have said about them behind their backs, or what the public thinks of them. It’s truly inspired.
In a particularly virtuosic display last week, when everything was looking a little bit too cosy and comfortable, they split the boys and girls up in different houses and sent in a load of new hotties for a few days to do things like play ‘sexy charades’, and other games that involved a lot of snogging.
They told the boys ‘what goes on tour, stays on tour’ before sending their partners in the other villa compromising pictures of their antics.
This is what makes Love Island truly pioneering in the saturated reality market — there are no rules; there is no discernible format.
Drama is the main imperative. It’s unclear how they eat — there is no mundane Big Brother-style arguing over cooking or cleaning up, they can smoke as much as they like and the digs are luxurious. The only thing we have to watch is snogging, chatting about boys and boys chatting to girls. It’s bliss.
Even in Ireland, we’ve taken to watching a load of Essex kids in their knickers talking nonsense.
They made a real play for us recently with the introduction of Rob Lipsett, brother of Roz, and we fell for it hook, line and sinker.
Not that we needed much encouragement; there’s something about the innocent premature coupling and fast forwarded relationships that speaks to our traditional national values.
What could be more Catholic than snuggling up in bed with a clothed person for a night of exquisite sexual frustration? Not being able to do anything in case your Mammy and everyone else caught wind of it and were talking?
Needless to say, we were delighted when we were going to be represented. Because this is Ireland, we all knew exactly who he was and who his family was and all his business before he joined the island.
It was Rob Lipsett, self-proclaimed “online influencer and public speaker from Dublin” — unluckily (or perhaps luckily) for Ireland, this was all he got to proclaim on the show.
None of the girls seemed to take an interest in him, so he was unceremoniously dumped from the island off-camera after a couple of episodes.
It’s unclear whether, like another guy who joined and left at the same time as him, the girls ever actually learnt his name. The viewers certainly didn’t.
There was another Dubliner, Shannen, whose main airtime came from snogging fan-favourite Marcel.
Irish Twitter was half devastated and half gleeful at Rob and Shannen’s blink and you miss it appearance. It read like a modern parable of Ireland abroad: invited to the party, but not getting a serious look in. And the dearth of international attention only being balanced out by the excitement back home.
In the UK, it has prompted many beard-stroking think pieces in serious newspapers, which would have been unthinkable not long ago.
The general consensus is that, in a time of fear and global upheaval, we need escapism more than ever.
And where could be better to escape to for an hour every evening than a Spanish island with a load of sexy, kind-of stupid, twenty-somethings?
North Korea have tested a nuke; Jonny snogged Tyla.
Another terrorist attack: Kem snogged Chyna.
Donald Trump is president: Will Camilla snog Jamie?
But that’s too simplistic — we didn’t fall so hard for Ex
On The Beach, or even TOWIE. For a concept so contrived and beset by fake personalities, fake noses and fake relationships, there’s something about
Love Island that seems to cut to the very core of the human heart. Because behind the fake boobs is a real heart — a heart that experiences the same crushes, jealousies, insecurities, wobbles and schemes that we all do, whether we admit it or not.
Love Island displays the kind of feelings that the Germans or Dutch probably have a word for — the feeling of wanting other people to fancy you even though you only have eyes for your partner, or the irrational desire for your boyfriend to be jealous.
Petty is name of the game in Love Island, but in reality love is fairly petty itself. There are no great literary love stories here — and I suspect that’s why we’re watching in our millions.
‘Even here, we’ve taken to watching kids in knickers talk nonsense’