Last summer, I wrote about how I couldn’t understand anything about Love Island. Clinging on to the last vestiges of common sense 2019 had to offer, I dug in my heels and refused to have anything to do with the brazen, oily skinned Neanderthals, whose greatest achievement in life was ordering the correct size of pink teddy bear jacket from boohoo.com.
However, thanks to an almost full term of the gonk in the White House, the introduction of a slightly smaller troll doll at Number 10 and the inexorable rise of idiocy, I now find myself unable to resist. I have been helplessly swept along on a slipstream of sunscreen, bumhole bleach and cries of“it is what it is”.
It would appear that the ‘trick’ to the show is to watch it from the beginning. Start watching it even at episode two and you will invariably flounder, wondering why someone with giant boobs is being dunked in a giant cup of tea and encouraged to snog a scantily clad Mancunian scaffolder who can’t string a sentence together.
This series is slightly different in that it’s on in winter and filmed in South Africa, in a villa with a baffling amount of stairs. Male contestants are either called Connor, Connagh or Connaaaaargh. The girls are called Paige and Leanne and there’s also the gloriously monikered Siânnise Fudge, who regularly ricochets angrily around the garden in a neon-string bikini shouting “It’s pronounced SHONICE!” Intellect is scarce, although I am warming to Shaughna (or possibly Shaunaggggh) who describes the boys as “like sumfink out of David Attenborough, puffing up their chests”. There are also some blonde twins that look like a bad drawing of Diana Dors (Google it, kids!).
I can’t be bothered going into details, but it’s a revolving door of temptation, with an ever-shifting cast list of identical buff lads. If I take my eyes off it for one minute, I have no idea what’s going on. Yet underneath it all is a steadfast moral code and a courtship dance akin to a Jane Austen novel, albeit one of her unknown ones set in the Stockport branch of Jumpin Jaks.
You have to get to know each other. Loyalty is prized and game play is despised, which is strange considering they’re playing a game that involves getting off with everybody in sight. You have to always tell people when you’re gonna swoop in and steal their bird. And even though nobody is ever knowingly wearing any clothes, coy attachments form that are rather touching. At least that must be why I find myself crying like a granny at a wedding any time a couple gets together. Oh well, what does it matter? We’re all idiots now.
