'Love Island' is 'Big Brother' with a facelift

Just when we thought reality TV had had its day, ITV2’s ‘Love Island’ becomes a national sensation.

In the age of the laptop, gathering around the TV set has become the modern equivalent of a family day out. Perhaps this is why so many people have taken to it. Couples watch it on the sofa together. Teenage girls will watch it with their grans. People bond at work over it, like they do about the football.

The contestants are very watchable, and I’m sure are all nice people. The only one I’ve seen in person was one of last year’s winners, Kem, when he was presenting the awards at some event I was working at a few months back. Some of the waitresses at the event managed to get a selfie with him, and said he was very nice. I believe them, and no doubt he’s done well out of Love Island.

The show, at first glance, is not as depressing or cruel as the ghastly ‘Big Brother’, or the Jeremy Kyle Show, or even the X Factor.

Big Brother treated its contestants like lab rats, and normalised righteous mob bullying, pettiness, bitchiness, indignity and low level conversation. I cannot forget the way media pundits joined in with the stirring when a clearly unstable housemate was ganged up on and bullied early on in the 2006 series, or when the blatantly orchestrated feud between the hopelessly uneducated Jade Goody (who has since passed away) and the Bollywood star actress Shilpa Shetty unfolded. In the 2007 series of the Australian version of Big Brother, a female contestant wasn’t told by the producers about the death of her father. This caused uproar, rightly. But if there was widespread media uproar about the show as a whole in the first place, then that would never have happened.

The X Factor is in part a talent show. But, more so in the old days, it allowed people who were not only not good singers but who were clearly vulnerable and delusional to make it through to the televised auditions where they could make fools of themselves and be laughed at by millions of viewers across the country (including me), with their tragic humiliations kept on YouTube for all eternity. In some cases they would let the same people back on year after year.

Jeremy Kyle, the spawn of his equally repulsive American equivalent Jerry Springer, made millions from making a laughing stock out of the most vulnerable and weak people in this country. The demise of large parts of the British working class is not a laughing matter. It not only normalised mocking of easy targets, but the interference in the private lives of others.

A population, slumped on the sofa, distracted by televised garbage that makes circus freaks of their fellow countrymen and women, that spits on the ideal of dignity and privacy. If that isn’t dystopian then what is?

So, how does Love Island compare to this?

Reality TV producers appear to have toned down the overtly cruelty and callousness that they thrived on during the Blair years. They know that the world has changed, just a little bit. The self harming emos of 2008 are now the Instagram narcissists of 2018. “It’s time to talk about mental health” is a running them among celebrities, on social media and in our universities and, I assume, our schools. Memes have evolved to the extent that everyone is now hyper self aware, and therefore, inevitably, less inclined to be overtly judgemental to others. Reality TV needs a new face, one that is both soppy and glamorous at the same time.

What the reality TV producers needed was a show in which people could still make uneducated imbeciles of themselves and still cry before the camera, but without the capacity for bullying and irrecoverable humiliation.

Love Island was the solution to this. Because all the contestants look so good that they have been picked out of thousands of other good looking people, there is a limit to the extent that they can be degraded.

Furthermore, they are not being eliminated from the show over petty, superficial popularity, as contestants are on Big Brother and that appalling Channel 4 programme “Coach Trip”, in which contestants have to vote the fellow travellers they like the least off the programme. The Love Island candidates win on the basis of how they work as couples. “I don’t think they’re right for each other” is very different to “I don’t like him/her.”

Indeed, Love Island is not as bad as Big Brother. It is much more palatable, and that’s why it has made reality TV great again, with no sign of losing its appeal.

And yet, many of its contestants are still exploited, degraded, or left regretful and utterly lost. Like so many reality TV show contestants, they have all the disadvantages of celebrity status (public humiliation, intrusion, and the sudden drying up of gigs and popularity) and none of the advantages (wealth, respect, and security).

Zara Holland, who rose to fame after being on Love Island in 2016, lost her title as Miss Great Britain after having sex with another contestant in the Love Island villa. In an article, (read here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-44884963) titled “Reality TV and Mental Health: I wish I’d never gone on the show” – Holland reveals that she had been feeling “anxious and depressed” ever since going on the show. It is also stated that, disturbingly, she has since been prescribed anti-depressants (is rational misery really a mental health problem?).

The same article features an interview with Sarah Goodhart, a former contestant from another (similar) reality TV programme, who went on the show expecting to become rich but ended up in heavy debt and with panic attacks “worse than ever”.

Both Sarah Goodhart and Zara Holland knew the late Sophie Gradon, whose death and whose boyfriend’s subsequent death weeks later ought really to have overshadowed the Love Island final more than it has. Sophie, who had a history of anxiety and depression, had been one of the Islanders in the 2016 series.

Sarah told the BBC that she suspects that Love Island was a “contributing factor” to Sophie’s death.

“It’s actually quite sad how many times Sophie has reached out to friends and said ‘This experience wasn’t good for me.'”

Just hours after the BBC published this harrowing article, it puts at an alleged news story titled “Love Island winners revealed” on its front page, underneath “Family say goodbye to Novichok victim”, “Court backs agreed end-of-life decisions” and “Sexual abuse ‘endemic’ in aid sector”.

Is the idea to have the Love Island final as the token “good news” story in the midst of all the bad things that are happening in the world? Or is Love Island seriously considered to be as newsworthy as all the other stories listed on the front page?

Either way, it is fundamentally wrong. Reality TV is not a renaissance, it is, at its core, just as nasty and dangerous as what went before. How can a serious outlet like the BBC, publish a claim that Love Island contributed to a young woman’s death one minute, and then give importance in celebratory tones to that same programme the next?

You might say that Love Island cannot be directly blamed for someone’s death, and that loads of things have the potential to drive someone over the edge. This would be a fair point. But Love Island does actively try to push people over the edge. It manipulates and degrades its candidates for the sake of ratings. If you doubt me then just look at the way the show manipulated Dani Dyer, by separating her from her love interest, Jack, bringing Jack’s ex girlfriend into the villa and then showing her a misleading video which lead her to mistakenly doubt Jack’s loyalty to her. This left her in tears.

Her father, the Eastenders actor and mainstream media’s go-to working class bloke with opinions, Danny Dyer, flew out to Ibiza to get her off the show, but was persuaded not to persist by the producers.

Though going through feelings of jealousy and anxiety are a fact of life, no one deserves to be deliberately made to feel that way. Rightly or wrongly, people lose their minds when they are heartbroken or jealous. There was some mild media fuss about the audial, and Ofcom did receive 650 complaints about this callous act of manipulation, but chose not to act. I don’t hold that against Ofcom, people who choose to go on shows like Love Island really ought to expect this sort of thing.

But let’s stop pretending that Love Island is nice. It is at best, just another brilliant distraction from the important things that are happening in the world which a lot of people ought to care more about. At worst, it is the manipulation and exploitation of young people for the sake of ratings.

Stick to the memes, kids.

#loveisland #reality