Last year, after bumping into her at Glastonbury, I congratulated Caroline Flack on the success of the second season of Love Island and we spiritedly discussed how sexist it was that then-contestant Zara Holland had been stripped of her beauty queen crown for sleeping with someone on the show.
I was upfront about the fact I hadn't ever actually the ITV2 programme but, due to my then job as a national newspaper showbiz column editor, I was aware of the mild interest building around the show following the slut shaming incident.
But, if I’m honest, the subtext of my congrats was more ‘way to go that your show isn't the train wreck flop we all thought it would be’ and, as ridiculously unfair as the whole Zara situation was, I was still harbouring some 'yeah-but-having-sex-on-TV-whatever-gender-is-still-a-bit-grotty-though' judgement.
I'll admit, I thought Love Island sounded pretty goddam pits of TV awful.
Smash cut to one year later at Worthy Farm…
I’m in the middle of a field half-listening to a wailing indie act, hunched over my phone as I furiously try to get on the internet so I can get to the bottom of whether a Cypriot footballer (aka Muggy Mike) with the looks of an Adonis stone sculpture – but also sadly, the personality – has had his end away with a woman who makes her living plugging teeth whitening on Instagram.
In just a year the ITV2 series has transformed me, and many others who swore they’d never watch such nonsense, from sneering snobs into unashamed, salacious Love Island obsessives.
During the show’s seven week run, which culminates tonight with one final episode now that the couples are back in the UK, I’ve enjoyed chilling out with a red wine backstage during filming with The Flack, chatting about everything from politics to masturbation etiquette with dumped Islanders (more of the latter than the former to be fair) and digging up any imperfections I can about this year’s crop of cellulite-less contestants as they’ve unexpectedly become front page news.
So, just did the nation become so gripped this year with a show about twenty-somethings, well, gripping each other?
A Little Less Action, A Whole Lotta Love
Love Island has become so much more than ‘that shagging show’ thanks to some very conscious but subtle retools to the series. In 2016 Caroline defended the sexed-up nature of the series, telling me: ‘It’s like a Benny Hill sketch when we briefly show the sex – it’s all tongue in cheek and silly with funny music.’
But this year that defence strategy has been dropped as she earnestly declares: ‘It’s not about the sex at all, it’s about the romances and the relationships and the journeys and the push and pull unfolding between couples. ‘There is such a heart to this show underneath all the cheekiness and that’s what people relate to.’ Undoubtedly there has been a concerted effort this year to promote the romance over the raunchiness. And last series’ scandal with Zara has been a hugely significant factor behind this.
ITV bosses were secretly extremely concerned by the fallout - especially when she blamed the tryst on being drunk. Producers made a point of telling everyone within earshot at a media dinner days before the show started that ‘this year we're being very careful to tone the sex down’.
So much so that Love Island even went to the unprecedented step of releasing a statement denying a tabloid story that show-runners had demanded the cast have more sex, stating: ‘We follow the couple's relationships, not their sex lives.’
To ensure no one stumbled into bed with another body but not without their wits, there was a booze limit of just two glasses of wine a night.
Islander Jess Shears, who was the first female this series to get hers, explained: ‘they’re very scared of people having sex and regretting it.’
Post copulation, contestants were dispatched to be debriefed by producers to make sure, following their physical satisfaction (one hopes), they were also equally emotionally sated. Resident psychological therapist Marcie Ferros was hired to be on hand 24/7 if needed. Crucially, pre-show briefings for the contestants featured heavy lectures about consent and condom use (although they were all given an STD scrub down beforehand) - including a sex etiquette handbook they had to read.
2017 contestant Sam Gowland told me: ‘They sat it by the loo and told us to make sure we gave it a read. No sex in the showers, don't get your bits out while just walking around the house and...don't dive-bomb in the pool is what I can remember. I dive-bombed in the pool all the time, like.’
His fellow islander Simon Searles bluntly revealed what he considered the hardest - er, no pun intended - rule: ‘Don't masturbate, even though it's a bedroom it's a public bedroom you know.’
‘Literally no one masturbates in there. Everyone is just uptight. There's lads in there who have done nothing for weeks and weeks. They are suffering.’
Cutting down on thrusting footage and focussing on heart to hearts that viewers could emotionally empathise and connect with gave the show a new lease of life.
As Caroline explained: ‘When you see Camilla crying after such a cruel rejection you remember when you went through something similar, when you see Olivia unable to express how she feels so lashes out you think ‘maybe I’ve done that’ and you just want Marcel to be your boyfriend.’
Dozens of sex sessions between couples were never screened as show chiefs insisted X-rated footage could only be included in the final edit if it was key to the episode's ‘narrative’.
This new ‘reality TV meets art-house indie flick’ outlook meant viewers were denied the chance to witness fits of passion such as, er, Kem bonking Amber underneath an inflatable turtle in the villa’s pool.
This focus also, undoubtedly, made the sex – which, whether embracing your inner pervert or not, we all wanted to see a bit of – more of a treat when it was peppered in.
I guess the lesson here is, whether on Love Island or not, we should all be striving to have sex sessions that are more purposeful to our life's overall narrative.
Naturally Artificial
So now viewers can truly engage with what is going on in the villa without the distraction of those big, throbbing, pesky sex sessions prodding us in the back for attention every second. But many of Love Island’s biggest sceptics struggle with the artificial nature of the programme.
‘Find true love for the chance to win a £50000 cheque’ – admittedly, it doesn’t seem like the strongest foundation for genuine everlasting love to flourish.
Obviously, that is a mental hurdle that viewers who want more than a bit of glossy, silly escapism have to overcome because the show – rather brilliantly – does not try and hide the truly ridiculous essence of its concept from anyone. Every single unnatural element of the programme is amplified and exaggerated. Viewers are never allowed to forget they are watching a reality show that, in theory, we shouldn’t be taking too seriously.
It’s hard to work out whether Bertolt Brecht would be spinning in his grave or voting for Jamilla on the Love Island app. Take Ian Stirling’s brilliantly ironic voice overs that pick apart the obviously highly stage-managed tasks, routinely spotlights the mechanisms behind the filming (hello Benny on camera three) and flippantly cuts through the emotional tension with some good old-fashioned mockery. Yes, he’s funny, the tasks are frivolous and the producer’s puppetry of the contestants is blatantly obvious.
If things are quiet and they need to steer the narrative a certain way then they’ll suddenly drop a specific task that unleashes key previously hidden pieces of info. If tension centres around a recoupling, they’ll decide the order of picking that is determined to cause the most chaos. If there’s a budding romance that just isn’t quite moving fast enough then, lo and behold, they’ll suddenly ‘by chance’ be offered a date or a night in the hideaway.
As Chloe Crowhurst said: ‘During the day they’d be instructions announced over a speaker for people to go certain places and in the beach hut they’d suggest it was time for you to have a certain conversation with someone or lay your feelings bare.’
‘And the tasks were always like, right, this is the task that will cause the most drama today so let’s do that one.’
So, if it’s all a vacuous piece of escapism then why did half the nation (OK, me) go to bed sobbing after Jonny jumped ship from HMS Camilla to Tugboat Tyla? This heightened stylised unnaturalness only serves to exaggerate in stark contrast how devastatingly real the contestant’s emotional journeys – whether happy or sad – truly are.
Like it or not Love Island conspiracy theorists, it’s pretty much impossible for a twenty-something to sit for seven weeks in a villa with nothing to do but tan and flirt and maintain a façade for that entire length of time with a member of the opposite sex.
Even Muggy Mike and Tuna Melt Theo (who were about as genuinely interested in finding true love as Olivia was with mothering baby Cash Hughes) couldn’t curb their sexual attraction to women who would undoubtedly poll low in viewer votes and couple up with ‘safer’ options in a tactical move that would have kept them in the villa for longer.
The show’s glamorous air also jars with the messy, mascara-splodged tear-stained reality that the episodes often confronted us with. Contestants are plied throughout the weeks on the show with free clothes – rumours are that brands such as ASOS ship crates of fancy threads into the villa every week – and special stylists are at hand to make sure they look extra perfect for big events.
Even host Caroline has pointed out that it’s slightly ridiculous that everyone on Love Island is unspeakably gorgeous and immune to that sweaty upper lip thing everyone else gets when they’re out in the sun all day. She joked: ‘I do sometimes feel like that’s why they’ve hired me, to add a touch of normal into proceedings. It would be nice if somebody was a bit older but there’s something exciting about watching all these beautiful people have the same problems that we all have.’
The unfiltered truth of the matter is show bosses are reluctant to start piling in your mad aunt Betty with the 17 cats because they need to eradicate the problem that no one will fancy anyone. So the best way to deal with that is to cast a load of Insta models, personal trainers and members of defunct noughties boyband.
Craig Lawson (of ‘creepy’ fame) pointed out that the contestants are so beautiful that even in the real world when their grafting options are endless, they can’t stop coupling up with one another.
Take for example Jonny who, after mugging off Camilla and being mugged off by Tyla (who has now been mugged off by mugging overlord Muggy Mike) is now inexplicably romancing bit part Islander Chyna (mugged off by Kem who initially mugged off Amber who had etc etc etc). He told me: ‘I didn’t think for a second I’d get on the show, I’m probably the most normal looking of the bunch.’
Case in point, a show production member told me when they first saw Craig – who is of course far from the horror show people painted him during the show’s run – they assumed he was a new Islander’s PR. ‘Everyone has to have a six-pack, a tan and not a snaggletooth in sight,' they confessed to me. 'It’s a fantasy and we have to maintain the illusion.’
‘Bad’ girls doing good
As discussed, last year Miss GB publicly declared that, due to her having sex on a TV programme, they could no longer ‘promote Zara as a positive role model’. But this year I would argue the very different female personalities on this series, how they have behaved and been received has created a dialogue amongst viewers that has driven interest in the show.
Most interestingly it has been the viewers embracing of female contestants who have demonstrated behaviour that has in the past inherently been coded as ‘bad’. Take Montana for example, voted midway through the run as the viewers’ ‘favourite girl’ (with Marcel voted the ‘favourite boy’).
True this – thankfully – was not a vote as to who was the villa’s best female role model, but instead a vote for who do you enjoy watching best for an hour every night. But they didn’t vote for, at the time, the two more typically ‘good’ girls – Camilla and Gabby, although both popular – and that is refreshingly telling.
Montana was upfront, frank and unapologetic about what she wanted – from friends, from food, from potential lovers. She snogged the most boys in the villa (don’t drop your handkerchiefs in horror Miss GB organisers but it was a mammoth four different tonsil tennis partners), was open about her ever building sexual frustration at not finding one she truly clicked with and when that lucky lad finally entered with his six pack on show, she didn’t waste too much time getting down to business with him. She wasn’t coerced into rushing her feelings, candidly admitting she did not love her other half Alex yet and bravely shared personal details about her family life that she felt had held her back emotionally.
I would happily argue that a woman as assured in her decision-making as Montana is a far greater role model than anyone sitting on the Miss GB beauty panel. Similarly, Camilla – touted early on as ‘so much better’ than the rest of her fellow Islanders (‘what is she doing here’ etc) because she had a ‘more respectable’ background – recoded what it meant to be a ‘good girl’ when she, shock horror, also enjoyed some late night bedroom activity.
She said on exit that she did ‘what was true to herself’ and did not worry about ‘employment opportunities’ i.e she realised having sex on TV does not make her any better or worse at defusing bombs in war torn countries
Changing televisual tastes mean the audience crave 100 per cent reality from these programmes, to the point where we end up questioning far more why a woman would not be having sex if she was in a committed relationship a la Gabby.
Amber and Olivia were equally, rightly or wrongly, put under the microscope for their behaviour while their male counterparts bad moments were more quickly brushed under the carpets. Caroline said: ‘We work really hard to find great contestants, especially the girls.’
‘I love the girls, they always have their decisions criticised ten times more than the boys. People on Twitter are really harsh – you have to made of strong stuff if you come on this show as a woman and all our girls are fantastic this year.’
With Amber, she appeared to have a real moment of clarity in the house when she realised that she did not like where her previous behaviour had got her and seemed to make a mature and insightful decision to adapt.
Olivia was self-proclaimed ‘damaged goods’ who hid her vulnerability under the guise of being a ‘dickhead’. She was also refreshingly self-aware – when calm - about her behaviour and often reflected bluntly to the beach hut camera that she was aware she was being hypocritical at times…but so what?
Their complicated, compelling characters sparked conversations off across the country. Far from being objectified, well they were a bit but so were the men equally (this show definitely has a gender-neutral gaze) in their bikinis, they were allowed to opportunity to express themselves and look fabulous in glamorous swimwear.
One can only hope their warmly received turns on the show will encourage even more strong-minded, complex and entertaining women to apply for next series.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.