In summer season 2015, ITV revived its 00s actuality format Celebrity Love Island, a present that was remembered principally as a drunken, downmarket rival to Big Brother. Its new, slick, civilian Love Island was a slow-burn at first, however by 2017 it was one of British TV’s greatest hits. While it stays amongst ITV’s hottest properties, viewing figures are now more modest, with 600,000 folks tuning in for its 2026 launch. Tastes have modified, however the indisputable fact that three folks related to the present – former contestants Mike Thalassitis and Sophie Gradon, and Caroline Flack, the presenter for 5 collection – took their lives, may have made viewers cautious.
Timed to coincide with the finale of the newest collection of Love Island on Monday, Prime Video has launched this two-parter about the obvious “curse” that stalks the programme. It opens with former contestant Anton Danyluk, who appeared on the present in 2019, declaring that there’s “no higher high than the summer you’re preparing for Love Island”. But a stint in the present’s Mallorcan villa proved much less of a excessive for some. Luis Morrison – a 2015 Islander – says it feels “disgusting” and “embarrassing” to observe the present again. “Everyone was having sex and stuff,” he says. Malin Andersson, a 2016 contestant, says, wanting again, the present feels “quite toxic … so superficial and artificial”. Watching footage of herself coming into the villa for a post-elimination row together with her companion, Terry, Andersson alleges there was a lot meddling on the half of the programme-makers: “The producers are fucking with people who can feel deep things!”
So far, so not surprising; these are all criticisms that might have been levelled at Celebrity Love Island in 2005, or just about another actuality courting present. But in the direction of the finish of the first episode and into the second, issues get darker. Steven Douglass – an in depth good friend of Gradon’s – speaks about her “zest for life” earlier than the present, and the “spark” that pale as soon as she was in the public eye and a sufferer of relentless trolling. Thalassitis was given the nickname “Muggy Mike” for his apparently sneaky behaviour. Former Big Brother psychologist Linda Papadopoulos says right here it was a label that was reductive: “You’re distilling down a multidimensional human being into a catchphrase.” Gradon died in 2018, Thalassitis in 2019. There was, says journalist Caroline Frost, “a pattern forming” round Love Island.
The drawback, of course, is that such deaths are extremely complex, and more sophisticated than The Curse of Love Island is provided to take care of. Papadopoulos says: “This isn’t about trying to point at a show, or a company, or a person.” Yet a lot of the documentary concentrates on the programme somewhat than the on-line vitriol, monetary pressures, household issues, present psychological well being circumstances, relationship issues, rolling media protection, or the mind-bending actuality of instantaneous renown. Marcel Somerville, who appeared in the 2017 collection, says: “If the care that is currently being offered to contestants was being offered back then, it might have had a better bearing for Mike.” Except that the improve in look after Love Island’s contestants – remedy, contact for 14 months, plus recommendation on funds, social media and adjusting to their new lives – solely happened as a result of of these tragedies. We can ask whether or not more might have been executed earlier, however we are going to by no means know whether or not it will have made a distinction. Dave Read, who has managed many former Islanders, together with Thalassitis, says the media have gotten it “so wrong” with regards to plotting a straight line between the present and his demise.
Danyluk’s frank testimony, rooted in two experiences on the present, is the programme’s saving grace. As reported in the press in 2024, he turned a heavy drinker and drug consumer after Love Island, and tried to take his personal life. Incredibly, he would later return for Love Island: All Stars in 2024, unable to shake the feeling that he had more actuality mileage left in him, and wanting “to close that chapter of my life”. It was an expertise which, he says, felt “a lot more produced” than it had the first time round. There was more help for contestants the second time, however that elevated obligation of care was, as he tells it, undercut by the producers frightening conditions that have been “causing a spiral effect online”. “I wouldn’t do reality TV ever again,” he says.
Read says: “You need skin like a rhinoceros to be able to deal with this industry. That’s not a Love Island thing, that’s the whole industry. It’s savage.” Indeed, the Curse of Love Island makes many legitimate factors about the difficulties of the actuality world, however it appears to neglect that Love Island doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The thinker Mark Fisher wrote in Capitalist Realism in 2009: “Reality TV is continually haunted by questions about fiction and illusion.” In the years since, the huge enlargement of social media has solely intensified that uncanny boundary between actual life and leisure, efficiency and documentary, pathos and bathos. Surely the drawback right here is just not a lot the Curse of Love Island, however the well-worn curse of in a single day fame.
The Curse of Love Island is on Prime Video now.
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123. In the US, you can name or textual content the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to attach with a disaster counselor. In Australia, the disaster help service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other worldwide helplines can be discovered at befrienders.org
