When I was at school, there was a really attractive girl called Sarah Campbell* who everybody fancied. I was fat and borderline repulsive, but these traits had forced me to try and become funny. (I wasn’t witty or talented; I was merely willing to abandon all dignity in order to gain approval.)
After one break time, during which I felt I had been on top comedic form, I plucked up the courage to approach Sarah and ask her if she’d want to hang out. She laughed and said, “Very funny, Rom.” Our relative aesthetics meant that the very idea she might want to go out with me had to be a punchline.
My only solace was to hope that Sarah’s life might progress as a series of awful failures, escalating to the point where she ended up destitute in the gutter, crying and wondering where it had all gone wrong, before wiping the tears from her eyes, looking to the sky and thinking, “I wish I had gone out with that fat Asian kid at school.”
My school days have been very much back at the forefront of my mind while watching Love Island, the hit TV show full of Sarah Campbells. The extreme popularity of this programme is being hailed by many as the greatest ongoing threat to modern civilisation, as if we weren’t simultaneously dealing with the very real possibility of nuclear war. I haven’t seen too much of it, but what I have gathered is this: some incredibly attractive people are dropped off on an island and then have to pair up, drink lukewarm prosecco and have sex until, one by one, they are asked to leave. Essentially, this show is what happens when a TV producer is off their tits on a night out in Faliraki and suddenly thinks, “I reckon this might be a TV format.” It is a voyeur’s dream.
But social commentators have become very upset, claiming that Love Island heralds a dumbing down of society, and that the record viewing figures suggest the imminent arrival of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. People have fixated on the fact that, last year, more people applied to Love Island than to Oxford and Cambridge, completely ignoring the fact that Love Island has much lower grade requirements and all you have to say in your personal statement is, “I very much enjoy the sex.”
It is always interesting to see what the cultural elite deem appropriate for consumption by the masses, while simultaneously dismissing the masses as savages. Why do they find Love Island, in particular, so offensive? There are many shows that partner people up (First Dates, Love In The Countryside) and are not labelled the end of humanity. Even shows such as Big Brother, while divisive, don’t tend to make it on to Question Time, where the panel last week debated whether the Oxbridge stat was “a fair reflection on our society”.
The answer seems fairly obvious to me: we don’t want Love Island to be popular because all the contestants are hot. They have gorgeous, sculpted bodies with single-digit body fat percentages and hair that moves only in strict adherence to a preordained choreography. They look like every person who ignored you at school – the kind of people you see at the beach and then feel forced to keep your T-shirt on when you go into the sea. The beautiful people.
The problem is that nobody ever admits this. Instead, they dress up their resentment as an anxiety about the demise of British culture and the state of the country’s youth. This is a lie: it is intellectual elitism. What I want to see is a think piece on Love Island in which the columnist simply admits, “I hate Love Island because it reminds me I have a dad bod.”
Also, why is Oxbridge heralded as the yardstick by which young people should be measured? In order to get into those universities, you take your gifts and you work incredibly hard to maximise the potential of those gifts, until you achieve the hard-earned results that are not accessible to everybody. And that sounds a lot like the process required to attain a set of visible abs. We all seem blind to the fact that the type of people who get into Oxbridge benefit from fantastic genes every bit as much as somebody whose face demonstrates perfect mathematical symmetry. (This is all, of course, before we even get into discussing the inequities of the Oxbridge application system.)
Love Island is not for me, nor would I ever want to be at a swimming pool near any of the contestants without having on three layers of clothing. But it’s a great thing that the show exists, and that people enjoy it: they should not be judged for doing so. Gogglebox, however, is still absolute crap.
*Name left unchanged so that people can know she rejected me.
- Hadley Freeman is away. The Misadventures of Romesh Ranganathan will be on BBC Two next month