Love Island: the show with everything our “new normal” is lacking
In 1965, the first televised dating game show aired in America. In The Dating Game, an unmarried man or woman sits behind a screen asking three suitors questions. The various suitors can be seen by the audience, but not the single man or woman, and each suitor has to try and one-up their competitors with their answers to win the man or woman’s affections.
Fifty years later, across the pond, the dating game show had evolved through many forms into ITV2’s Love Island. The reality dating show involves a group of young and attractive twenty-somethings being introduced in a Spanish villa where they must “couple up”. Over two months, different couples date, split up, fall for one another, let their eyes wander, recouple and are voted off the show. In the final, a select group of couples face a public vote to win £50,000. Every summer Love Island dominates popular culture discourse (and probably dinner table conversation too, if you have teenagers in the house).
You would be forgiven for dismissing the show as superficial, pointless and insecurity-breeding. It is all of those things. And yet, I can’t think of a more fitting series for this so-called “summer of love”.
As with most reality television, many Love Island viewers enjoy a “love to hate” relationship with the show. For those who fear that by watching the show they might accidentally like it and ruin their otherwise highbrow cultural sensibilities, the label “guilty pleasure” seems to absolve these worries.
The media enjoy a toxic relationship with Love Island, too; The Mirror called it “the most appalling thing this country has ever done”, The Guardian, “disrespectful and even dangerous” and The Telegraph, “reality TV’s cruel nadir”. But no one can stop watching or writing about it.
After last summer’s Love Island was cancelled due to Covid-19, viewers were increasingly desperate for the return of this year’s season. But its absence in 2020 isn’t the only reason Love Island is more necessary than ever this year. The show promises everything our “new normal” is still lacking: sun, sex and no social distancing.
After a year-long ban on hugging, kissing and casual sex, watching the islanders share a bed with the person they coupled up with just hours previously feels especially outrageous. And the single islanders are set to be rowdier than ever due to back to back lockdowns. The Dutch have sexual health organisations encouraging young people to date and have sex; the Brits have horny labourers from Northumberland trying to cop a feel on national television. It might sound vulgar, but compared to the CCTV video of Matt Hancock last week, it will be borderline artistic.
Not only will Love Island provide some much-missed bad behaviour, it is also the holiday escapism we are sorely lacking. For an hour each evening, you can almost feel the sun beating down on you as the islanders lethargically lounge by the pool and develop their already deep tans. The specific holiday idleness that comes with 30-plus degree temperatures is everything the rainy British working week is not and somehow watching them do nothing is quite relaxing in itself.
Though the islanders and the show’s crew had to isolate before entering the villa, any mention of Covid has been joyfully absent so far (though one islander who lives with his grandmother has undoubtedly been set up for brownie points on that topic at some point later in the series). The shout of “I’ve got a text!” from one of the contestants doesn’t indicate ten days of isolation but an exciting new challenge or plot twist. And there isn’t a mask in sight.
Above all, it is not the show itself that causes so much excitement each summer, but the conversation, memes and op-eds that stem from it. If you feel your social skills have taken a hit due to lockdown, what better than Love Island gossip to make for easy conversation. Just ask the labour MPs who famously made a group chat to discuss the islanders’ antics back in 2018.
It would be remiss to promote watching Love Island without acknowledging the controversy and tragedy surrounding the show. Since 2015, two contestants, Sophie Gradon and Mike Thalassitis, and presenter Caroline Flack have died by suicide. In the wake of these tragedies, Love Island has been under pressure to provide contestants more support during and after the show, which I truly hope they are doing. But the enthusiasm for the return of Love Island this year suggests there could be hidden value in the show after all. Perhaps it is exactly the unpolitical and mind-numbing pure entertainment we need to warm us up for a (hopeful) full relaxation of Covid rules later this summer.