TV’S TAWDRY SUMMER SMASH
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that trashy television has to be artificially elevated before it can be acceptably consumed in Britain,” said Stig Abell in The Sunday Times. I’ve heard Love Island, reality TV’S annual summer hit, referred to as everything from “a bit like Jane Austen” to “Shakespeare in swimwear”. And while these lofty comparisons are a bit of a stretch – the show’s banality is hard to overstate – there must be a reason that three million “presumably sentient” people tuned in to watch its opening night, setting a record for ITV2. That’s not to mention the fact that 85,000 people applied to be contestants this year, more than twice as many as applied to Oxbridge.
Love Island is “the horribly unforgiving swipe-left culture of online dating made flesh”, said Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. It opens with the men being paraded “like beefy show ponies” in front of the women, who step forward if they fancy one of them. If the feeling is mutual, they become an instant “couple” (though the intrigue of the show lies in the constant “recoupling”). But it’s fair to say that the #Metoo memo hasn’t yet reached the island, said Tanya Gold in The Daily Telegraph. In the first week, the women donned skimpy superhero outfits for a task entitled “Girl Power”, which involved them trying to squash melons using their bums.
“It’s porn without the porn,” said Hugo Rifkind in The Times. “It’s the absolute joy of getting a bunch of horrendously beautiful people and putting them in an environment that is not so much sexually charged, but utterly decharged of anything else.” The contestants have to pair up – if they don’t, they get booted off – and we get to know them as we watch them attempt to speak about their thoughts and feelings. There’s Jack, who has shiny white teeth and sells pens; Niall, who was looking for love (which he defines as “liking somebody even when they’ve not got make-up on”), but has now left; and Eyal, a model, who wants “somebody who isn’t superficial”. “What does superficial mean?” asks fellow model Hayley, who also wonders if after Brexit, “we won’t have any trees”. With gems like these, no wonder people find the show irresistible.