From the Archive: I watched an episode of Love Island so you don't have to
It's not all about football, is it? In 2021, when I worked in an office, I had to find a way of integrating at the vending machine and this was the result. I do not miss offices in the slightest.
That it should have come to this. I, like many of you, work in an office. It is often said that television is a dying medium, that the days of turning up at a time determined by a committee to watch an event on a screen are coming to an end. Live sports, news, or other “current” events perhaps are exceptions to this, but with regard to what we would – a little ham-fistedly, but I trust you take my point, here – call “television shows”, though, almost everything is streamed, these days. It’s online, it’s streaming, and you can usually consume as much as you want of it, at your leisure. Sitting down at a set time once a week or even every night to watch a show, feels kind of dated. Young people than I, however, are still tuning into event TV, they’re doing so right now, and they’re doing so in droves.
Love Island is arguably retro television before it even starts. It’s an entertainment show which is a must-see for millions. Fair enough, a lot of people will watch it on catch-up, but even the Twitter feed of this middle-aged curmudgeon gets clogged up at nine o’clock on a Thursday evening with four word tweets that do not make any sense to me whatsoever. “What a waste of a swimming pool.” “I can’t wait for Molly Mae vs Maura.” “Said it before. Say it again. Tommy is as wet as my dog’s blanket.” Without having ever seen a single second of this show, I could be persuaded that these are Russian spy codes, sent to implant positivity about Vladimir Putin directly into our brains.
So, before it starts and without looking anything up, what do I know about Love Island? I think I know that it used to be called Celebrity Love Island, but that they had to drop the word “celebrity” under a fear of breaking the Trades Descriptions Act, such was the dearth of actually famous (by any reasonable metric) actually appearing on it. I think there might have been one person during the “celebrity” days – Paul Danan, formerly out of Hollyoaks – who ended up basically acting as an office sex pest at the workd Christmas party, which the producers then decided to use as a trailer for his return during the following series, which sounds like pretty reprehensible behaviour, to me. I don’t think it’s been running continuously since it was first broadcast, but I couldn’t tell you when it ended and when it was brought back.
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