Gossip Girl

A lot of people have been asking me recently how I choose what to write about next.  And by a lot of people, I actually mean nobody – I’m just using an Instagram trope here.  Friends tend to look away sheepishly if I ever ask them directly about reading my blog.  If I wander over to a conversation about boxsets in the office, silence suddenly descends as people fear I’ll try and promote my writing and opinions.  Sure, everyone wants to tell me what to review, so now I’ve got a list of shows I’ll never get through, but then people only read if they like the programme I’m rinsing.  But no, each one of these is a gem, so please read them all.  If you don’t like the show, there’s enough rambling about me as a person to counter that.  And this week is no different.

Currently bogged down in some big old boxsets, I’m raiding the archives again.  Two things have brought Gossip Girl to the top of the list.  One is the return of colder weather to London after the inhumanity of July’s heatwave.  As a sweaty adult, I couldn’t be happier.  Winter is coming, and everyone knows back to school is the best time of year.  You can get a new pencil case, some fresh pens, and you’re another year up in school, which increases teenage coolness no end.  However, I’m thirty-three and I work in an office.  Rather than returning from the summer hols reinvented, I’ve not been off since April (though that was for a trip to Japan, so, you know…) and we don’t have pencil cases at work due to the clear desk policy and the replacement of pen and paper by laptops.  But no, it’s colder and I love it.  And if there was ever a show for giving you winter coat inspiration, just take a look at any episode of Gossip Girl.  Every character, even those on supposedly limited incomes, has an endless supply of on-fleek winterwear.  This might give you some pointers on the quality of Gossip Girl’s drama, the fact that coats are the first thing that comes to mind when I think about the show.

The second reason is that I recently passed the ten-year mark in the job I so freely berate in these posts.  In June 2008, at my final interview, I talked about Gossip Girl in answer to an important question.  In those days, the department I was entering mostly only did TV sponsorships.  My two interviewers were asking me which I had seen on telly myself.  Let’s set the scene.  I had cycled across a boiling London from my hellish old job, so I was sweaty (recurring theme) and dishevelled, with uncontrollable helmet hair.  I also had an eye infection, thanks to the effect of general London dirt on my Home Counties eyes.  So my contact lenses had been abandoned for the NHS specs I only wear behind closed doors.  On the thirteenth floor of a Holborn office block, the sun was shining directly in my face, optimising the sweat-fest conditions so much so that I had to rub the perspiration repeatedly from my clammy forehead.  Don’t worry, I totally got the job obviously, and my new colleagues later told me they got a Harry Potter vibe from me due to all the conditions of my appearance I have just described.

So what TV sponsorship should they realistically expect a twenty-three-year-old lad to talk about?  Maybe some sort of football or other ball sport?  No, I was happy to make a banging first impression by talking about Gossip Girl.  If you’re going to enjoy TV aimed at teenage girls, you might as well get that out in the open as a first step.  In those days, a combination of graduate poverty and historic media technology meant that TV could only be consumed as per the TV guide.  ITV2 seemed only to schedule Gossip Girl at 10.35pm every third Thursday as long as the moon was blue and pigs were flying.  Didn’t stop me though.  I never missed an episode, complete with Guerlain sponsorship idents for a sickly-sweet perfume aimed at teenage girls (like me) with olfactory challenges (not like me).  Cue me bossing the question with epic insights into why the brand and the programme were the perfect convergent fit.  Cue my future employers hiring me because I reminded them of Harry Potter.

After 750 words, then, I should probably tell you what the show is about.  The premise focuses on an exclusive Manhattan school for wealthy kids.  Enter via bridge or tunnel Dan Humphrey, a scholarship-endowed chap with curious side-burns, played by an actor named after a brand of tennis ball (Penn Badgley).  His crush on Serena van der Woodsen (a charmingly ingenue Blake Lively, but with a chequered past when it suited the plot) generated the tension of the first series, if I remember rightly, but luckily this was all stretched out for six series of 121 episodes.  Little bit of Mean Girls, little bit of Cruel Intentions, little bit of anything that’s ever been set in New York: this was Gossip Girl.

Well, that was the whole point: which of the main characters was actually Gossip Girl?  I never finished watching the show, so I don’t really know myself.  It doesn’t matter as I can’t be sure I ever understood what this concept was supposed to be anyway.  These were the days before smartphones and 4G.  Using the internet away from your ethernet cable was limited to noticing your ancient mobile had accidentally switched on WAP and imagining an extortionate bill on your Orange tariff.  This didn’t stop Blair Waldorf or Chuck Bass in their conniving ways, using this nebulous platform to drop dirt on friends and frenemies alike, setting us viewers up for a roller coaster of crossing, double crossing and back crossing until seeing the end credits came as a welcome release.  Each instalment would culminate in some sort of catered event: a birthday party, some welcome drinks, basically anything.  In the run up, boyfriends and girlfriends would need to betray each other in the best interests of each other (I think), resulting in a climactic unearthing of the truth on Gossip Girl, heralded by simultaneous mobile bleeping as the blast came through and the action kicked off.  I say action, but the boys were restricted to conveying emotion through smoulder only, and the girls similarly limited to pouting, so the whole thing resulted in the kind of face porn that makes you disappointed to leave the comfort of your own home and see an ugly person.  Or there might have been one in the actual house with you, which was all the more shocking due to its proximity to Nate Archibald or Vanessa Abrams.

In 2012, Gossip Girl bid us XOXO for the last time, inspiring a Beyoncé classic, but leaving a glamorous teen drama-shaped hole in all of our viewing lives.  I’m none the wiser about who ended up with whom, but the Upper East Side must be awash with genetically blessed babies by now.  A reboot wouldn’t know what to do with itself.  Gossip Girl would have to go multi-platform, with accounts on SnapChat, Tinder, Insta and probably LinkedIn.  I just hope Dorota is on more than minimum wage and that Eric van der Woodsen no longer has a centre parting.  So, to all those a lot of people who have been asking me what’s getting covered next, just chill out and keep reading yeah?  At the rate this thing is growing, you’ll be able to claim early adopter status by 2020.

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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Survival Of The Fittest

Winter Love Island, they said.  It will fill the gap between series of your favourite Balearic-based flesh-fest, they promised.  And so, ITV2 unveiled Survival Of The Fittest, from the same people that brought you reality TV’s breakout formula.  This blog was going to be a highbrow guide to the quality boxsets that vie for your attention on Netflix and Amazon, causing you the inertia I referenced here.  Instead, I’ve been unable to hide my addiction to trashy formats, especially if those feature attractive young people in beachwear.  I’m saving Love Island for this coming summer, and Bromans has already been covered, but I’m very happy to say that Survival Of The Fittest falls in the same vein.

It could not be better timed.  Something about 2018 so far means it’s not only been cold and wet, but it’s been consistently the coldest and wettest year since records began (and by that I mean since I last paid attention, which might be linked to the fact that I got used to 35 degrees during my South Africa trip).  It therefore follows that an hour of telly each night that’s set in a place so hot the contestants visibly glisten in front of the cameras is the broadcast equivalent of vitamin D.  Coincidentally, the show is actually filmed in the shadow of Table Mountain, so it’s serving a dual purpose of reminding me about how much I enjoyed my fantastic holiday (did I mention I went to South Africa?) and reminding me that hot weather exists.  The African theme is impossible to avoid.  The only prize on offer to the contestants seems to be safaris, but that’s not a prize to be sniffed at.  And indeed, the African heat somehow makes Love Island’s Majorca setting look like a rainy caravan park in Blighty.  It’s clearly as hot as old balls.

So what on earth is this show?  Its prime purpose, aside from filling a gap in ITV2’s schedule, is to answer the age-old question: which is the better gender, males or females?  This is a battle between the sexes to find out who comes out on top.  The fact that the fighting typically involves timed assault courses with puzzles at the end gives you some understanding of the academic and scientific rigour on hand in the formula.  We have six boys and six girls, with each team desperate to prove theirs is the sex that is better at assault courses and puzzles.  Whichever team loses a challenge is then vulnerable to the opposite gender selecting one of their ranks to be sent home from the free African holiday.  Don’t worry though, as a replacement (in beachwear) is brought in the next day to even the numbers back out.

But what about the shagging?  Well yes, you can’t have nearly naked beautiful people in extreme heat without some shenanigans twitching the duvet covers while we watch through an infra-red camera.  The whole twist of the show comes from the expectation (which is quickly proven correct) that relationships will spring up between the genders and cause team loyalties to be questioned.  So be warned, it’s more complicated than Love Island’s premise of get in a couple or get out.  It’s a case of fight for your gender but also see if you can diddle someone of the opposite sex so they don’t vote you off in case you are slower at assault courses and puzzles.

Some other things you should know, handily arranged in bullet points to speed up your decision-making process about whether these three weeks of titillating telly are required in your life:

• The Flack role is covered by Laura Whitmore, who copes well with the wobbly bridge that leads to the savannah lodge the contestants inhabit, though she does seem to view the boys and girls themselves with irritation
• There is an irreverent voiceover, but it’s not with a Scottish or regional accent, so is around 35% less funny.  This means it’s still quite funny
• Sometimes, little monkeys raid the kitchen, reminding you that this is Africa, just in case you had forgotten among all the shots of hippos and giraffes
• As with Bromans, the bodies on display are banging, and you’ll be torn between arousal, and self-hate that you should be in the gym and not shoving your face with Crunchy Nut Cornflakes on the sofa while watching kids half your age have the time of their lives
• Danny Dyer’s daughter was in the first line up and was just embarking on her own “don’t tell anyone, but I was in Blazin Squad” moment before she smashed her shoulder in on one of the, er, assault courses
• There’s an app.  You know, for your smartphone.  So you can be a millennial while you watch

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This is all capped off by a bewildering sponsorship by Beauty Bay, though their best idents do feature Alex and Olivia from, you guessed it, Love Island.  I assume Beauty Bay is some sort of online make up jumble sale, but I refuse to give them any more attention here.

To conclude, we must ask ourselves, is this Winter Love Island?  And the answer is a resounding: sort of.  It’s set somewhere else, so it’s more like Winter Love Island In Africa.  Plus, it’s a battle of the sexes, rather than a battle to have sex.  So it’s actually Winter Love Island Gender Battle In Africa.  And finally, there are assault courses and puzzles, so the most accurate name is Winter Love Island Gender Battle In Africa With Assault Courses And Puzzles.  But that’s a ridiculous name, so they gave it the lame name of Survival Of The Fittest.  But I’ll finish on these three words: feast your eyes.

Bromans

I don’t know what it says about me as a person, but Bromans really was 100% my format on paper.  Even back when I had only just found out what it was called, I knew I would be watching it.  It was an inevitability as certain as me fast-forwarding through the bad dances on Strictly Come Dancing or averaging about 1.5 episodes of Friends per day (and still laughing out loud).  In my real actual job, I work closely with ITV and had seen this gem coming up in the schedules a mile off.  In fact, it was going to be called Ladiators, but changed at the last minute.  The fact that both names are genius just goes to show that we are working with televisual gold here.

Have you ever wondered how today’s lads would fare if they were forced to train as Roman gladiators?  Have you ever wondered how their girlfriends would also fare if they were forced to live in Ancient Rome?  Me neither, but Bromans strove to answer these questions with as much slow motion footage as possible of attractive young people in scant cladding.

Despite its 2017 debut, Bromans stuck rigidly to assigned gender roles.  Was this historical accuracy, or just a lazy format?  The boys were the ones who actually got to take part in the fighting, wrestling, posturing and chasing.  Casting was a reality TV dream.  There was the skinny TOWIE cast off, the muscular TOWIE cast off, lots of tattoos, a Northern joker and a very well brought up rugby chap (each with a matching girlfriend).  Mostly in their underpants, they would take part in training sessions in the blazing sunshine under the watchful eye of Doctore.  I’m not sure what was more entertaining, none of the contestants remembering the word Doctore for the first few episodes, or David McIntosh’s very earnest attempt to play a serious character while he put the lads through their paces.  I’ve since bumped into David at a party. And by bump into, I mean that I was knocked across the room like a rag doll after accidentally colliding with his enormous bulk while getting out of someone else’s way.

Meanwhile, the girls would pursue more domestic activities, such as crushing grapes for wine and offering spa treatments to the boys.  In Bromans’ defence, the couples did share the duties during the laundry task, which descended into a piss fight.  I should point out that, for historical accuracy, the show recreated the Roman practice of using piss as a detergent, much to the contestants’ retching.

Each episode would culminate in the lads’ final competition, before, in a lavish ceremony, the bottom two performers would be forced to try and persuade the others to keep them.  Public speaking didn’t seem to be on the list of requirements when casting Bromans, so these slightly awkward moments are luckily topped by what follows: the remaining Broman couples then stand behind which lad and girlfriend they want to save.  The losing boy subsequently realises that everyone has mugged him off, is forced to remove his toga and march off in his golden underpants.  Classic.  Meanwhile, a banner emblazoned with his face is torched to signify his departure.  Depending on the wind, it might also flap into the other lads’ banners and set them on fire too, but they don’t show that on camera.  It’s more something you can assume.

In all of this, you have an epic set, complete with extras.  The budget seems to have been there literally to rebuild Rome, and it probably took more than a day.  Maybe two days.  I’m assuming the show was filmed abroad, which probably means the toga-clad extras have no idea what’s going on, but I’m sure they still really enjoyed themselves.  Because the couples live and sleep on set throughout, the show takes on a Love Island vibe.  They don’t shout out about getting a text (this is Ancient Rome, silly) but there are the usual arguments which tick the boxes of people looking for a bit of drama.

So finally, I hear you ask, what happens when you watch Bromans?  Firstly, you are torn between lust and wanting to go to the gym, depending on your sexual preferences (it’s 2017 so we are making no assumptions).  There are muscles, if you like those, and there are bikinis getting torn off, if you like those.  If you like both, then you may need to sit on a wipe-clean surface.  Secondly, you will learn approximately one thing per episode about how the Romans probably lived.  But you won’t care.  And lastly, knowing that this show was a must-watch for me, you’ll be appalled at me and my viewing choices.