Hate Archipelago hypocrites: Columnists condemn ‘decadent’ Love Island from their own poisonous positions…
Murdoch, Rothermere and the brother Barclay have done more to damage Britain than a million Botoxed reality show contestants ever could
Previously: Dispatches from Hate Archipelago: Simon Heffer and Sarah Vine on Larkin and Love Island
I come neither to praise Love Island nor to bury it. I’ve watched past seasons of the ersatz romance show for plastic people and enjoyed it in the same way that I enjoy cheap sausages and sour sweets that should really be labelled as a form of chemical weapon. But this year, through a combination of disinterest and waking up at 5 am to write a curséd media criticism newsletter, I haven’t seen any of it.
Still, following the example set by the columnist class, I won’t let that stop me from having an opinion. And my opinion is that columnists chasing the clicks that Love Island guarantees while pretending to have nothing but disdain for it are more tedious than even the most staged recoupling. For a columnist in search of reasons for *gestures around* all of this, Love Island is a cheap and easy answer, the WKD Blue of societal scourges.
In The Daily Telegraph today, Madeline Grant informs her desiccated readership — most of whom probably assume Love Island is a porn parody of Treasure Island in which Long Dong Silver has sex with a woman dressed as a parrot — that the show is “a symbol of our vapid, rotten culture.”
While I’m sure Grant knows about “vapid, rotten culture” having dated Lawrence Fox and no doubt having had to endure his ‘music’, her assessment of Love Island is as hyperbolic as The Daily Telegraph’s ‘citation needed’ masthead claim to be “Britain’s best quality newspaper”1. She writes:
Earlier this week, as Love Island staggered towards its season finale clutching its strappy sandals and trying to get the fake tan off the bedsheets, I decided to peer into the abyss… It soon became clear that the show’s name is a misnomer; it deals not in love but in low, feral cunning.
Instead of romance, there is moonlight, Muzak and the chance to win £50,000, though contestants – a mixture of young men and women who live together, isolated from the outside world, in a Mallorcan villa – insist they’re not in it for the money. “I’m buzzin’ because it’s ended with a girlfriend”, was one male contestant’s verdict on Monday night.
Yes, an ITV reality show with ‘love’ in its title is not, in fact, a celebration of polite courtship and the search for a long-term and committed relationship. Nobody tell her what “friendly fire” means.
Of course, Grant hasn’t just turned on Love Island because she simply must find out what it’s about — a flick through her own newspaper’s website, which covers the show for SEO reasons while pretending to be above it, would quickly get her up to speed — but because it was an easy subject to fill the howling void of the blank page as her deadline approached.
Grant, who went to St. Hilda’s College, Oxford and whose mother is fellow Telegraph columnist Sally Jones2, sneers at the way Love Island contestants speak, mocks their intelligence in a predictably Telegraph fashion…
The word “like” punctuates every sentence like a clanging bell. Earlier in the series, one contestant, a trainee doctor no less, claimed that with a powerful telescope you could see dinosaurs on Earth from Mars.
… and grumbles about the show’s focus on looks:
After what feels like hours of preparation, the female contestants slink out in slow-motion to greet the men. “You look unreal, babe” one of the suitors says; injecting a rare moment of truth into proceedings.
This is the same Madeline Grant who, as an Oxford student, was fined £120 for writing in her manifesto to be The Oxford Union’s librarian that she had “a great rack”. Her future employers at The Daily Telegraph had great fun reporting on the row and Grant told The Times:
Ten days ago Cherwell, the Oxford University student newspaper, ran a story about my manifesto and claimed my actions were anti-feminist. I didn’t mind, I was just annoyed because the pictures they used didn’t show off my rack.
You see when she used (or at least joked about using her looks) in a silly contest it was a satirical act but the contestants on Love Island represent society ruining decadence. Grant’s column today continues:
As our ancestors queued up to watch public hangings, the only entertainment value that can be derived from Love Island is a sordid voyeurism at the contestants’ expense.
Interestingly, Sir Peter Bazalgette, the brains behind Love Island forerunner Big Brother, is a descendant of Joseph Bazalgette, the Victorian civil engineer. While Joseph pioneered the London sewage system, so the joke goes, his great-great-grandson has specialised in pumping metaphorical excrement into the public sphere.
It shows industrial amounts of brass neck to crow about anyone else “pumping metaphorical excrement into the public sphere” under a Daily Telegraph byline.
The paper that plays host to the conspiracy theory-hawking Allison Pearson, the autocrat’s favourite auton Douglas Murray, malignant Beaker cosplayer Simon Heffer and the noxious emissions of Charles Moore is so full of shit that, to borrow Christopher Hitchen’s obit for Jerry Falwell, with a thorough enema it could be buried in a matchbox.
Grant assures the reader that she “could rant about this monstrosity forever” and with Love Island due to return next year I’m sure she’ll wring at least another column of hyperbolic disdain out of it.
Showing the Mr Magoo-level lack of perspective that ensures continued employment at the modern Telegraph, she continues: “…it is probably what the Romans were watching when the Visigoths breached the Salarian Gate.” I thank her for the image of Goths with fresh blowouts and even fake tans standing to have their selfie portraits painted before they rampaged through Rome.
Grant’s ultimate angle is that Love Island is a catalyst for shallow culture, the promotion of cosmetic surgery, and unrealistic beauty standards for women and men alike. She writes:
… the show’s dominant aesthetic has become universal. It is credited with sparking a surge in demand for fillers, Botox, boob jobs and butt lifts. I see it trickling into daily life too; friends who have to watch every penny nevertheless save up for injections, while high street beauty salons hawk cosmetic procedures alongside haircuts – a bouncy blow-dry with a side helping of Botox.
That’s maybe a defensible argument… unless you’re writing it for a newspaper whose website features the following articles in its ‘Beauty’ section right now:
The simple trick to finally mastering fake tan (without any streaks)
I had no choice but to have my teeth 'done' for medical reasons…
Can 'ice globes' really give you a slimmer-looking face in 10 minutes?
There’s nothing inherently wrong with writing about beauty or the body but the notion that The Daily Telegraph plays no part in “hawking cosmetic procedures” is ludicrous. This is just another example of how newspapers pretend that they play no role in putting pressure on people and somehow exist outside the way culture is defined, packaged, and promoted.
Grant concludes her column by saying:
Love Island isn’t just influential in its own right; its rise symbolises something much more rotten. It embodies the body ideals and selfie-driven narcissism which spark misery everywhere. It fetishises mediocrity, sending a message that you don’t need to do, think or achieve anything to get ahead in life. Our Love Island love affair does us no credit at all.
Perhaps she should start by castigating her editors for their obsession with Love Island. You don’t have to spend long on The Daily Telegraph’s website to see it:
The Betting section exploited the search trends ahead of the final (Love Island 2021 betting odds and how to get a free bet), its TV reviewer gave the show 3/5 (“…where else can you hear someone say 'She went to town on my ear lobes'?”) and there have been no fewer than 14 features and comment pieces published about the show since June (you can find them on the paper’s dedicated Love Island page).
The Telegraph is by no means alone in having it both ways when it comes to Love Island. The Times has also published a piece putting the blame for shallow beauty standards on the show (Love Island and how young people fell for cosmetic surgery) — and I thought we were still blaming the Kardashians and the Jenners for that one — while multiple columnists have referenced the show over the past week and the paper has published at least one Love Island story a day for the last five days.
But the gold medal-winning team in the hypocrisy relay has once again been fielded by The Daily Mail. Just yesterday, MailOnline published 18 stories about present and past Love Island contestants. It published today’s first Love Island related ‘news’ piece at 00:44 this morning. Meanwhile, Sarah Vine wrote in her Mail on Sunday column last weekend:
I hate [Love Island] so much. Hate it with a passion. Hate the vacuous messages it sends and the cynical way it manipulates the contestants. Hate the soapy sentiment and the overblown emotions. Hate the cookie-cutter version of physical desirability it promotes.
And as I also wrote at the weekend, every word of her critique could be applied to the Mail titles. They obsess about wealth and status — house prices are crow-barred into stories about violent deaths — and fill their pages with things you can buy and do to "make yourself happy”.
Mail headlines are the newspaper version of highly processed food. They do nothing but manipulate, focusing on a soapy idea of relationships, and are designed to elicit overblown emotions (usually anger but sometimes pity).
Vine writes of promoting a “cookie-cutter version of physical desirability”. Again it’s precisely what her employer does on a daily, in fact hourly, basis. Right now, the ‘sidebar of shame’ has Mark Wright “showing off his muscles”, Maya Jama “showcasing her enviable hourglass figure”, Kaia Gerber “showcasing her runway legs” and Emily Attack “putting on a leggy display”. Anyone who wasn’t a sociopath or a sub for MailOnline would sum up all of these stories as “person with body goes outside”.
This hypocrisy wasn’t Vine’s alone. Her colleague Melanie McDonagh wrote on Monday that “Love Island clones are a curse on our daughters… [creating] a warped identikit ideal of feminine beauty.” I presume McDonagh didn’t let her eyes drift to the stack of body-obsessed stories in the column to the right of her words when she checked her article on MailOnline.
McDonagh writes of her daughter…
Her generation are absorbing an image of physical beauty which is simply unattainable. Young girls feel they should look more curvy. Older women think they should have the body of young teenagers. So in the end, everyone gets to feel rubbish about the way they look.
… and says she makes sure that the 14-year-old doesn’t watch Love Island when she’s around. I hope she doesn’t leave copies of the Mail around the house if she’s so committed to protecting her child from toxic ideas about body image.
In yesterday’s paper, the edition that featured McDonagh’s Love Island piece in print, her daughter would have read about “what really causes middle-age spread”, “food that can help you burn more calories” and “how to beat clawed fingers”. She definitely should avoid any edition featuring Liz Jones, the Mail’s self-hating complicit living piñata.
Vine’s column on Sunday concluded, leaning on the same metaphors that Grant has picked up today, that:
[Love Island] takes us back to the Dark Ages. It’s barbaric and gladiatorial in the way it presents suffering as entertainment, encouraging us to salivate and pore over glistening young bodies as we follow the fortunes – and misfortunes – of this surgically enhanced, fame-hungry group of desperados… It’s cruel, crass and exploitative. And it demeans us all.
Remove the words “Love” and “Island” from that paragraph and you have a description of the British press. I said previously that “suffering as entertainment” could be the Mail’s slogan but I think that’s thinking too small; it could be the centrepiece of a promotional campaign for the entirety of the British press. After all, they “salivate” over the “fortunes and misfortunes” of others and are capable of more cruelty, crassness and exploitation than the producers of Love Island could imagine in their wildest dreams.
And yes, that demeans us all.
In fairness, it doesn’t specify what the quality is. Perhaps it means the quality of exuding more dark energy than an ancient grimoire and containing fewer facts than an estate agent’s description of a ‘compact’ studio flat that turns out to be a shed.
They appeared in the same series of Mastermind, fact fans. Grant got through to the semi-final before stumbling in the general knowledge round.