Love Island USA

In a roller coaster year of dizzying highs and terrifying lows, I’m going to point the finger at ITV2 for being both the cause of and the solution to a large number of these peaks and troughs.  As we all know, the calendar year is built around Love Island.  Normally those wonderful weeks of coupling up each night with an hour of guaranteed good telly (apart from the oddly unengaging Saturday night highlights/unseen shows) synchronise with our British summers of torrential downpours and sticky sticky heatwaves (both of which give everyone a first-hand experience of our climate crisis future), but 2020 got off to a great start with an absolute glut of Majorcan madness thanks to the inaugural series of winter Love Island.

But then, as we all know, pandemic pandemonium took hold and nobody knew how to make a show about cracking on if contestants had to remain two metres apart, not to mention the indecipherable lottery that foreign travel had become.  With a shrug, the whole series was cancelled and my life was ruined.  Then, it was divulged there would be no further winter edition in 2021, meaning it was over a year till the next UK series.  I can cope with supermarket queues and remote working under the threat of redundancy, but this was a major gut punch.  Naturally, I blamed Boris.  Naturally, he blamed immigration.  Surely Love Island 2020 could go ahead if everyone claimed they were testing their eyesight?

ITV redeemed themselves by screening Love Island Australia and, even though it was an old series, it was the vape to the cigarette of my Love Island addiction.  But then someone had the bright idea of taking Love Island USA and giving it to us in real time, allowing a glorious watch-along with our American brethren – it turns out our special relationship extends beyond a catastrophic covid response and being led by privileged petulant blonde fatties.  Of course, I stopped for half a second to wonder how on earth the States were going to run a reality dating show which involves the liberal exchanging of bodily fluids (orally, mostly) in the midst of a world health emergency.

Apparently, the islanders quarantined before entering the villa, ensuring a negative test for the virus.  More importantly, while a luxury island was out of the question, the perfect solution was found in a Las Vegas rooftop.  Offering hot weather and the constant background hum of downtown traffic (interspersed with sirens), the producers had struck gold.  In fact, so much of Love Island’s much-needed escapism comes from its almost complete refusal to engage with the outside world.  There were some initial comments about lockdown, but our couples soon became the truly insular islanders we would expect.  Sure, we’re all sick of corona, but the absence of a single mention of Black Lives Matter among a group of diverse young people seems like a missed opportunity.  Even Justine opening up about her family’s time in a Kenyan refugee camp barely warranted more than a few seconds of screen time when I could happily have watched a one-hour special on the subject.

But, if to Love-Island is to act as if the outside world doesn’t matter, then this series of Love Island USA is serving up pure escapism with our perception of reality deliberately removed.  The pandemic doesn’t matter.  The centuries of racial oppression don’t matter.  The climate crisis doesn’t matter.  All that matters is finding a boyfriend or a girlfriend, as being single is the greatest travesty of all.  But, whereas 2019’s season of Love Island USA made the competition to couple up all too obvious, taking the more American approach to reality TV (ruthless game-planning), this new version has realised that a lot of the format’s charm lies in sticking closely to the silliness of the UK original.  At last, we have an irreverent voiceover, mocking every single thing our island young folk get up to.  A glamorous host wonders in on the odd occasion with bad news.  People shout out “got a text!”  The ridiculous challenges have been shipped over and acted out blow by blow (literally), while Casa Amor was a resounding triumph, descending quickly into explosive orgiastic debauchery and creating great telly.  I shall hand it to the Americans – they are TV naturals.  Unlike the Brits, they take themselves a touch more seriously and are better at articulating their emotions, and they will never shy away from a cheesy Hollywood moment with no sense of irony, but the senses of humour are there, alongside the budding friendships you want to join in with.  Of particular note this season is the island girls’ predilection for slipping suddenly into outrageous British accents to ask each other: “Are you alriiiight?”  This contrasts delightfully with their otherwise as-apple-pie American accents and is a healthy reminder of how stupid British people must sound abroad.  And at home.

Of course, the teeth are whiter, but the bikinis and trunks are no tighter.  Some bits are different, some are the same, but it’s enough to tide me over in my lockdown (will we, won’t we) viewing.  Sometimes it’s nice not to hear the T word (Trump) or to see human beings experience social contact without a curtain-twitching neighbour tutting.  And if you’re looking for pure joy, I recommend Cely from this year’s cohort.  Her constant ray of positivity starts every morning when she jumps out of bed with glee while her co-islander squint and groan, before she goes on to tackle every challenge and tribulation with laughter and good humour.  As the final approaches it will be interesting to see what American viewers make of her relationship with Johnny and whether they rate it over the slower and steadier Justine and Caleb.  All I know is I’ll be sorry again when it’s all over, but maybe there’s another international version of Love Island I can distract myself with.

 

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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