Love Island Australia

To what extent is showing a 2018 season of Love Island Australia an adequate replacement for a new series of summer Love Island in the UK?

While this is a question I could ask ITV, it’s actually the essay question I have set myself for this week’s blog entry.  No, sadly I’ve not completed an impressive foreign boxset that I’m going to tell you all about this week (though a third and final series of Dark has dropped).  So we’re turning to what is fast becoming my favourite lockdown viewing.  Let’s be honest, this pandemic has a lot to answer for.  We’re not allowed to have strangers invade our personal space on public transport.  We can’t spend all day in an office wondering what the dog is doing while we’re not home.  We can no longer speculate whether our elected (no, really) government could cope with a national crisis (they can’t).  These are all things we can live with (or without).  But when ITV pointed out that a socially-distanced version of our favourite reality dating show might not fulfil our expectations (you can’t watch a couple under a twitching duvet via night vision if they have to be two metres apart), all while having no clue whether foreign travel would be in any way possible, it felt like the final straw.  This pandemic might just be a bad thing.

However, in a stroke of genius, they decided to whack on another nation’s first series, probably reasoning it was close enough.  The good news about Australia is that we’re super familiar with it.  It doesn’t suffer from the gloss of the US’s TV output (the scripted dramas, I mean, not the dross of their political news).  Generations of Brits grew up on Ozzie soaps – every weekday dinner of mine after primary school in the early 90s was accompanied by Home & Away and Neighbours.  We swap our populations back and forth, nowhere more so than in the media industry (where I work (from home)).  Australiana is pretty easy to get used to.  In addition, the Australian version has all the familiarity of also being filmed in Majorca.  Not in the same villa, mind, but near enough.  I’m struck by the imagined statistic that 80% of this Balearic island’s GDP comes from various nations filming their versions of Love Island on it.  These two points made Love Island Australia a much more obvious choice than the US version, whose departures from key format points and inclusion of actual Americans means it loses all the charm of the original.

Alongside the classic setting, we also have the characteristically irreverent voiceover, though the Celt of choice here is an Irishman instead of a Scot.  The stray cats that visit the villa provide most of the ammo for his humour but I think we can all agree there is nothing funnier than a cat.  Just look at the reason for the internet’s invention: cat videos.  We also have a glamorous hostess entering the villa with bad news for the couples at random junctures.  Sadly, we lost the UK’s OG presenter earlier this year after our vile tabloids hounded Caroline Flack to her death yet faced no consequences, with Laura Whitmore taking over from her dear friend.  In the Australian version, former popstar Sophie Monk proves a feisty equivalent, and her antipodean vowels are so wonderful that I can’t help but suspect she may be a new character from Kath & Kim.  There are still texts with hashtags in them.  In summary, it’s similar enough then…

So, in order to answer the question (and if I learnt anything from GCSE it’s that’s you must make sure you answer the question) we need to look at the contestants.  This was perhaps my greatest stumbling block when it came to convincing myself that I had been provided with a worthy replacement.  They didn’t do much to grab me in the first episode, though the girls’ reluctance to step forth for anyone at all was amusing.  There was a major lack of diversity.  But then, with any season, it takes a few days to marinade and, before long, I began to look forward to catching up on the previous night’s shenanigans with all my new pals after a videocall-heavy day at the laptop.

Somehow, then, this can become an adequate replacement.  But there are certain rules that I must impart when it comes to being able to enjoy it as much as a brand new series of our own.  The first is that you mustn’t look ahead online to find out what the future held in store for these young Australians who are so full of hope in 2018.  To do so would deflate any of the tension that makes the show so compelling.  The second is that you need to attune to a different vibe on the behaviour.  So far, the Australian girls have proven much quicker to attack one another, never hiding their mutual dislike (split along hair colour lines) which, while a contrast to the British besties that emerge, is actually palatable as a more honest approach to the villa’s interpersonal relationships.  The boys seem to be predominantly from the socio-economic group that Australians describe as bogan, but on the whole are a slightly gruffer and less flamboyant equivalent of our own tattooed chaps.

I’ll conclude my essay with the answer to my own question.  Love Island Australia is quite an adequate replacement, offering charm and entertainment in its own way.  To illustrate, we’ll touch on my favourites of each gender.  From the boys, it’s Josh who, while one of the slenderer and under-tattoeed specimens, wins out consistently on personality simply because he speaks with the authority of someone who knows that confidence is the same as, if not better than, intelligence.  When the boys ask him for wisdom, he’s happy to fabricate his responses with the hilarious consequence that they almost always believe him.  From the girls, it’s Millie.  Shrugging off any nonsense from those of her own gender when it comes to disagreements, she’s practical and resilient, and would much rather be writhing around in the pool on an inflated flamingo than getting into arguments.  Wouldn’t we all.

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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