How amoral Love Island is taking us back to the Dark Ages
THERE are few topics that divide opinion more keenly in my house than Love Island. The Teenagers, each in their unique way, are obsessed. My daughter watches it with her boyfriend; they seem to love and hate it in equal measure, taking sides furiously while at the same time disparaging the show’s obvious flaws.
Occasionally, I am drafted in to watch. On Friday night, as we observed various couples partake in a series of monosyllabic dates, culminating in Liberty (standardissue pneumatic blonde) and Jake (equally standard-issue tattooed hunk) announcing their separation, we were transfixed by Chloe’s underboob, Liberty’s white lace trousers, and the almost comedic attempts of their co-islanders to register emotion through the multiple layers of make-up, Botox and fillers.
Afterwards, my daughter asked me if I thought she should get a boob-job.
She is 18. I said
‘no’, obviously.
MY SON, meanwhile, takes a more straightforward, and some might say, male view. ‘I get that you hate it, Mum,’ he said, shovelling down breakfast eggs and beans yesterday morning, ‘but I don’t see what’s not to like about being sent to Majorca and being paid to have as much sex as you can with a load of fit women. Then come home to five million followers on Instagram and a bunch of brands desperate to sign you up and never having to work again.’
He is, as you can probably tell, 16. But he has a point.
His view is largely representative of his age group and, I suspect, the reason why Love Island is such a ratings-grabber. He is precisely the kind of market the show is aimed at – and the reason it boasts lucrative sponsorship and productplacement deals worth somewhere north of £70million, with brands including Tinder, Just Eat, JD Sports and various other sources of youthful gratification.
It’s also why I hate it so much. Hate it with a passion. Hate the vacuous messages it sends and the cynical way it manipulates the contestants. Hate the soapy sentiment and the overblown emotions. Hate the cookie-cutter version of physical desirability it promotes. Hate the fleshy vulgarity of it and, perhaps most of all, hate the rank hypocrisy and sheer brass neck of ITV for screening it alongside adverts for mental health charities and other empty minded sentiment designed to gloss over the fact that four people associated with the show, including former presenter Caroline Flack, have taken their own lives. Nor am I the only one.
This series (the seventh), has led to a record 33,540 complaints to the broadcasting watchdog Ofcom – most (24,910, to be precise) related to the episode where Faye (heavily enhanced pneumatic blonde) stomped around the villa hurling abuse at Teddy (wholly innocuous hunk) after she was shown an outof-context clip of him saying he fancied someone else.
It is, I’m afraid, just representative of everything that is depressingly soul-destroying about the modern world. The plastic surgery, the absence of morals, the something-for-nothing culture.
But that’s not all; it also takes us back to the Dark Ages. It’s barbaric and gladiatorial in the way it presents suffering as entertainment, encouraging us to salivate and pore over glistening young bodies as we follow the fortunes – and misfortunes – of this surgically enhanced, fame-hungry group of desperados. There’s something of the Colosseum about the way these muscle-bound young people are forced to demonstrate their physical and sexual prowess for the pleasure of the spectator.
Something humiliating and dehumanising about the way they all have to sleep together in the same room, to perform their tricks beneath the constant eye of the cameras; about the way they are carted off once a week to have their nails and lash extensions topped up, their excess hair removed, their fake tans reapplied before being sent out, once again, into the arena. It’s cruel, crass and exploitative. And it demeans us all.
Tomorrow is the final episode. Let’s hope it’s the last.
AND the barefaced hypocrite of the week award goes to… Prince Harry, for flying 750 miles home to California from a polo match (for charidee, natch) in a chum’s £45 million private jet.