Love Island

So, here we go; this is the big one.  No pressure, but there probably isn’t a bigger show out there right now.  I’ve got to get this right.  It’s an island, yeah, and there’s love on it.  Any questions?  I’m glad I started blogging about TV as now I get to put all sorts of pressure on myself to do justice to my favourite shows.  Love Island is so significant to 16-34s (TV buying language for young people) that, for the first time, I’m a bit worried that Just One More Episode might fall short of the mark.  Every other post has been sublime, as the very consistent read counts show (detect the sarcasm), so I’ve given myself a stiff talking to and on we shall crack.

In marketing (the broadest term for the industry where I’ve spent ten years making up the answers to questions), the year is divided up into Christmas and non-Christmas.  This is because December 25^th is the biggest cultural event in our calendar (in a world where cultural means commercial).  But now there is a second coming, catching up with the birth of baby Jesus at an alarming rate: Love Island.  Series four has just exploded across our summer screens like a bottle of sun cream where you didn’t realise so much was going to come out and now you’ve got an embarrassing surplus of white liquid on you and you’re trying to rub it in before anyone notices the mess you’ve made but everyone’s already seen and you’re trying but failing to style it out.  Clients started asking about hooking up with Love Island as soon as 2018 began.  Where people go, brands will follow.  So, join me, as we journey through the series that have led us to this moment.  Then we will investigate the emotions you experience in an average episode.  Then we will all just be, like, bonding over our love of Love Island.

2005 and 2006

Everyone has an embarrassing progenitor.  I have two (love ya, mum and dad).  And so does Love Island.  There were two series of the old format, which cast only celebrities in the contest to form couples in the sun or face deportation.  For some reason, I didn’t watch any of it.  I think I was living abroad.  It doesn’t matter, most of the contestants have since appeared on Celebrity Big Brother (still the most-read post on this entire blog, surprisingly), so I don’t think I missed out on anything.  The format then lay fallow over at ITV Studios for the best part of a decade, until…

2015

ITV2, one of the cheekiest channels in the UK, filled its summer schedule with a reboot of fondly remembered Love Island.  Gone were the washed-up celebs.  In strolled normal, real people.  You know, impossibly attractive characters that, if you came across them in real life, you’d stop and stare, just like people do at you and me, all the time.  Around half a million of us tuned into each of the 29 episodes, watching Caroline Flack look slightly embarrassed to be sorting through 23 different islanders until the winners finally emerged (with one ending up on Ex On The Beach, so winning can’t be everything then).  Everything just worked.  It was reality TV, but with beautiful people.  The tension was generated by the simple concept: get in a couple or get out.  Its Majorcan setting was like an ersatz-holiday.  The islanders felt like your friends, only better looking.  The casting was so careful that, instead of drunkenly duvet twitching like in Geordie Shore, there was a charm and classiness to the awkward dating and cracking on (before it led to duvet twitching).  I felt like I was the only viewer, as nobody talked about it.  My housemates at the time wouldn’t even let me watch it, so I caught up a day behind on Sky Go, hoping someone at Sky HQ would remember to upload the previous episode, which they didn’t always.

2016

Summer came back, and 26 islanders jetted back and forth to the same villa in Majorca.  I remember being surprised about how many young people smoke (though this is banned for 2018), but it must be stressful holding your tummy in for days on end.  The villa left nowhere to hide, with a sun-drenched terrace, outdoor kitchen (which we all want) and a very large pool.  Sadly, no ginger contestants could take part due to the risk of sun burning in the shade-free grounds.  This didn’t stop an additional million viewers per episode tuning in, with extra weeks tagged on before the finale.  Again, the casting was genius, with the bikini and swimming short-clad specimens achieving just as much in the field of personality as they had achieved in the field of making your body look banging for Instagram.  Your enjoyment of their relationships was only slightly dampened by how awful you are as a human mess in comparison.  Series two also finely tuned the regular tasks and twists to stress-test all the coupling up in order to surface the drama we had all gathered round to view.  There was even a same-sex pairing, a small baby step in Love Island’s journey to any diversity at all.  A handful of my office chums and I sniffed each other out to discuss each evening’s goings-on.  It was now our secret.  Apart from the one time at the gym when I ended up in a conversation with Henry Cavill and someone asked if he had seen Love Island.  He hadn’t.

2017

This is when we implemented the policy of don’t even come into the office if you haven’t watched last night’s Love Island yet.  Some people called it agile working and said it was a response to us running out of seats, but I know it was all down to the Flack.  Viewing figures had now almost doubled, with 2.5m of us tuning in.  You had to have an opinion on every argument.  You had to be able to quote every expression the show was contributing to the English language (“100% my type on paper”).  Luckily, you didn’t have to look like the islanders, as there were free donuts in the office and we needed some sugar to numb the pain of our worthless lives.  The show came into its own with a new villa (allegedly the old villa’s neighbours had had enough of the constant noise and mugging off) and this was even supplemented with a secret second villa.  I know now that Love Island’s production crew shack up in a sweaty cabin in between, planning when to drop bombs in order to set off fireworks among the budding romances and bromances.  Through work, I was lucky enough to attend a Q&A with the show’s producers.  I won’t go as far as to call this a career highlight, but nothing else I have achieved even matters.  I even won a Love Island water bottle with my name on, because I knew the answer to a trivia question was Tyne-Lexy.  I’ll assume you’re impressed.  Either way, the awkward stalking continued when I had a wee next to Theo.  Most of the 2017 islanders were at the ITV Gala that winter.  Trying to find my team at the hotel bar we had arranged to meet in, I accidentally found myself in a room where everyone was ridiculously good looking.  I was a steaming troll somewhere I didn’t belong.  I then realised this was the holding room for the Love Island cast and scurried away to find the normos.

2018

I left work early on Monday to make sure no transport issues could scupper my chances of getting home in time for the 9pm kick off of series four.  I was home by 5, so that was fine, but better to be safe than sorry.  It felt like Christmas Eve.  Whatsapp discussion groups crackled with hilarious observations.  The islanders completed their first pairing up.  The drama began.  We’re still in the early stage where the cast is too excited about being on the show to calm down properly and stand a chance of forming a relationship.  But, patience, we must allow this fine wine to mature.  Should be ok by Friday.

So there’s my blow-by-blow account of the series so far.  But what’s it like to watch an episode?  Let’s find out.  I’ve picked out some of the most common sentiments you’ll come across in your viewing.

Why would the sponsor have such bad idents?

Nobody knows why.  Superdrug have hung on the property since series two, after Match.com picked up the first.  The 2016 series remains a best-in-class about how to annoy viewers with irritating ident casting and then how to compound that by having them on a frequency of about a million.

The voiceover seems to hate everyone.  What is he doing?

He’s just enjoying himself.  Iain Stirling is the main instrument Love Island has in preventing everything from being taken too seriously.  You can tell it’s all from an affectionate place, and that he isn’t actually really fed up that series two’s Zara couldn’t stop mentioning that she’s Miss Great Britain or that Marcel from series three used to be in the Blazin’ Squad, innit, but don’t tell anyone.  It’s all a bit of fun, especially when some of the contestants are too young to remember Blazin’ Squad.

I should go to the gym more.

You probably should.  Islanders must do little else once they find out they’re on the show, with most of them carrying on with the calisthenics and curls at the in-villa gym.  Yet you’re still on your sofa just watching them.

They all seem like such good pals.

This is one of the best parts of the show.  The friendships.  Best known of these was the de facto civil partnership of Kem and Chris from last year.  Matching outfits, inside jokes, rapping together: this is what pals do nowadays.  Love Island lets you feel like you’re part of the friendship to such an extent that, when the series is over, you suddenly feel like your social life has contracted.  The reality is that it really has, as you’ve been sacking off real-life social engagements in order to watch it.

I’m cynical about whether they really are in love.

Well yes, you root for the ones that seem to belong together, or just for Camilla from last year to stop crying, but it’s worth bearing in mind that, for most of the day, they’ve got nothing else to do but work on their relationships.  The show has to construct situations where romance is accelerated so you can reach the arguing stage of being a couple as quickly as possible.  Arguing equals entertainment and we must be satisfied.

Why are people using hashtags in their texts?

I don’t know.

I want to go on holiday.

Yes, but you won’t look as good as an islander when you get there, so stay in your living room and view the show under cover of darkness.

I don’t think I could sleep in one big bedroom with all my friends, especially with people doing bits.

Another reason why you’re not on the show, then, and can just enjoy the experience vicariously through your screen.  Sleeping in that room is a small price to pay for the chance to front your own Boohoo.com collection once you’re out the house.

I like the look of the new ones they are going to add in.

Somehow, we still haven’t used up all the good-looking people in the UK, and there are yet more that can be brought into the villa to stir things up.  The show carefully trails these additions with gratuitous body shots so the perv in you can plan your viewing more precisely.

So there we have it, a bumper post, but this show is everything.  For an hour each evening (apart from Saturdays when you get fobbed off with a best of from the week before and, accordingly, nobody watches) you can be young, gorgeous, single and on holiday with all your new pals.  You’ll forget that tomorrow the alarm will go off and you’ll find yourself at your day job, but at least you’ll have Love Island to talk about. All together now: “I’ve got a text!”

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