Love Island is a symbol of our vapid, rotten culture

The reality TV show promotes unreal body ideals and feeds selfiedriven narcissism

Earlier this week, as staggered towards its season finale clutching its strappy sandals and trying to get the fake tan off the bedsheets, I decided to peer into the abyss. What could have prompted 2.8 million of my fellow Brits to tune into the reality TV show, including some of my nearest and dearest? (My best friend, God save her, is a fan.)

It soon became clear that the show’s name is a misnomer; it deals not in love but in low, feral cunning. Instead of romance, there is moonlight, Muzak and the chance to win £50,000, though contestants – a mixture of young men and women who live together, isolated from the outside world, in a Mallorcan villa – insist they’re not in it for the money. “I’m buzzin’ because it’s ended with a girlfriend,” was one male contestant’s verdict on Monday night.

While other reality shows prefer activities – performing the American Smooth on Strictly, choking on a deer testicle in I’m A Celebrity! – Love Island’s contestants do… very little. They chatter inanely, sit down, lie down, work out, walk around, make coffee, hang out, get ready, which they do endlessly, under the watchful glare of the villa’s cameras (there are 69 in total – har har). Even the dressing room boasts camera-mirrors so you don’t miss a flick of mascara or swish of the contouring sponge. After what feels like hours of preparation, the female contestants slink out in slow-motion to greet the men. “You look unreal, babe,” one of the suitors says; injecting a rare moment of truth into proceedings.

The word “like” punctuates every sentence like a clanging bell. Earlier in the series, one contestant, a trainee doctor no less, claimed that with a powerful telescope you could see dinosaurs on Earth from Mars. Underlying it all is a forlorn hope that contestants might have sex in the communal bedroom. As our ancestors queued up to watch public hangings, the only entertainment value that can be derived from Love Island is a sordid voyeurism at the contestants’ expense.

Interestingly, Sir Peter Bazalgette, the brains behind Love Island forerunner Big Brother, is a descendant of Joseph Bazalgette, the Victorian civil engineer. While Joseph pioneered the London sewage system, so the joke goes, his great-greatgrandson has specialised in pumping metaphorical excrement into the public sphere.

After three suicides, you’d think it might have prompted some soulsearching. But Love Island promises to return next year. I could rant about this monstrosity forever; suffice it to say that it is probably what the Romans were watching when the Visigoths breached the Salarian Gate. It is grotesque that it has survived for so long.

To many, Love Island is just mindless escapism or a “guilty pleasure”, but I don’t think it is quite as harmless as that. For one thing, the show’s dominant aesthetic has become universal. It is credited with sparking a surge in demand for fillers, Botox, boob jobs and butt lifts. I see it trickling into daily life, too; friends who have to watch every penny nevertheless save up for injections, while high street beauty salons hawk cosmetic procedures alongside haircuts – a bouncy blow-dry with a side helping of Botox. Though changing fashion has always been a feature of life, these surgical or cosmetic procedures will prove much harder to reverse than a dodgy perm or blue mascara fetish.

At the same time, social media threatens everyone’s self-esteem. Where once girls and boys might have striven to be the prettiest or the most muscular in their year, now they must compete with the entire online world. Instagram is a particular offender, immersing its users in idealised, curated images which masquerade as being “real” or “attainable” – but in truth all platforms encourage a solipsism that can be damaging to those with body image problems. Lockdown, by limiting external interactions and narrowing horizons still further, has only made things worse.

Though there is nothing wrong with taking pride in your appearance, we should also ask why the pornified Love Island “look” (doll features, guppy lips, aggressive contouring, perma-tan) has become so widespread. Its popularity, like that of the show itself, suggests a society that, for all its alleged empowerment, values shallow things – and a culture in which young people struggle to value themselves as they are.

The Noughties, when I was a teenager, saw concern about stick-thin supermodels, and rightly so. “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” Kate Moss said, launching a thousand eating disorders along the way. Though both are ghastly, I wonder if the influencer celebrity culture which replaced “heroin chic” is marginally worse; at least Moss was honest about the misery involved. Instagram, mingling unattainability with feigned “down-toearthness”, seems somehow even more insidious.

Love Island isn’t just influential in its own right; its rise symbolises something much more rotten. It embodies the body ideals and selfiedriven narcissism which spark misery everywhere. It fetishises mediocrity, sending a message that you don’t need to do, think or achieve anything to get ahead in life. Our Love Island love affair does us no credit at all.