LOVE Island: The cash cow that keeps on giving.
Giving, that is, feminism a bad name. Gas-lighters a platform.
Bullies air time.
And a bunch of Botoxed, six-packed, over-sexed twentysomethings 15 minutes of core-rotting, brain-frazzling fame.
In short, it’s one tired, battery-farmed, ol’ cow being milked dry by its hugely hypocritical owners, ITV.
Because, despite all the hype, this summer’s Love Island isn’t all soft and fluffy.
Read More on Love Island
It isn’t “woke”. And it most certainly isn’t toeing the #BeKind line.
Still, with a revenue of around £80million per series, why would ITV2 slaughter its juiciest livestock?
Almost four million of us are watching, and Love Island has racked up more than 100million streams in less than a month.
Last night’s show saw contestants play a cerebral game called “Suck And Blow”.
Most read in Opinion
These past few weeks have seen #misogyny and #sexism trending on Twitter, while last week “RIP feminism” was doing the rounds.
Naturally, many of the most appalled are those with virtue- signalling Ukraine flags, love hearts or rainbow emojis in their biogs.
And still they watch. The hypocrisy is utterly lost.
This series, the eighth, is the most watched since 2019 — back when former, brilliant host Caroline Flack fronted things.
A woman who tragically took her own life ahead of a very public court case, and after ITV had felt under pressure to let her go.
Of course, Caroline’s legacy inspired the #BeKind movement.
Yet this year’s series has seen men reduced to tears, mentally fragile contestants quitting, women twerking, and the usual, endless, tongue-heavy snogging.
Women have been “slut shamed” and contestants issued online death threats. Lovely.
While the ITV2 show professes to be about finding love, the mating rituals displayed are more soft-porn-meets-Planet-Earth than a nice bottle of wine and a DVD.
Take the annual “heart rate challenge”.
This year’s episode saw industrial amounts of baby oil on display as wannabes cavorted around like Theresa May on speed.
Doing the Suffragettes proud, Tasha dressed as Barbie while Paige turned herself into Pamela Anderson as she grinded on Dami.
Shameless execs
More disturbingly, there have been accusations of racism when viewers were tasked with pairing-up contestants for the first time.
The result was all four of the black hopefuls being put together.
Like orb spiders eating their own, viewers turned on one another — and accused the show’s new development of “segregating” couples.
Last week fans accused execs of turning a blind eye to Jacques O’Neill’s mental health struggles after he was shown sobbing on air.
Speaking to the Sun on Sunday, Jacques — who suffers with ADHD — claimed he’d been left broken by the show, but producers pleaded with him to carry on.
He quit the Majorcan House of Horrors following a bust-up with love rival Adam Collard — a Love Island graduate slammed by Women’s Aid for “gaslighting” his 2018 partner. And one brought back to shake things up by shameless execs.
Between June 2018 and March 2019, former contestants Sophie Gradon, 32, and Mike Thalassitis, 26, both took their own lives.
Gradon’s boyfriend, Aaron Armstrong, 25, killed himself three weeks after her death.
Since then, ITV pledged to do more to help wannabes cope with fame.
Psychological assessments are now mandatory, and contestants are given extensive after-show help and therapy.
ITV had been keen to publicise that Tasha Ghouri, 23, was the show’s first deaf contestant, and that it had ditched fast-fashion.
But for an organisation which proudly marched at this month’s London Pride event, Love Island has still, bizarrely, failed to include any LGBTQ+ hopefuls.
But why change a winning formula, eh chaps?
Still desirable
FINALLY, Hollywood seems to be catching on.
Last week I enjoyed Sandra Bullock’s latest romp, The Lost City, in which she stars opposite six-packed Adonises Channing Tatum and Brad Pitt.
Sandra Bullock’s latest romp is The Lost City[/caption]
Sandra with Channing Tatum in the flick[/caption]
In it, the ever-hot Sandra, who is 57, is fancied by both men and – spoiler alert – gets together with Channing, a whippersnapper at 42.
After decades of old men hooking up with barely pubescent starlets, it’s good to see Tinsel-town waking up to the fact women over 50 can also be desirable.
Jen, not again
“NEVER go back,” they say.
And they’re right.
Two decades on, Jennifer Affleck, née Lopez, has made the cardinal couple sin – not only going back to ex Ben, but marrying him.
I hope I’m wrong, but I give it five years.
Writing from personal experience, relationships NEVER survive a second stint.
After the halcyon first few months of reconciliation and blissful best behaviour, eventually you’re reminded precisely why you split up with the raging narcissist/ditherer/snorer/sociopath in the first place.
Don’t. Do. It.
NOW this is a website I can get on board with.
Only Flans, with an “l”, offers pastry enthusiasts a daily selection of moist, wobbling delicacies
Give me this over Kerry Katona with her hands down her pants all day long.
C’mon, girls!
TOMORROW night, England’s mighty Lionesses face Spain in the quarter-finals of the Euros.
Has a national team ever played in more unfortunate circumstances?
The morning after their opening match, Boris Johnson resigned, and since then they’ve been playing – fantastically – against a backdrop of unfurling political chaos, a headline-dominating heatwave and Putin’s mercurial madness.
The BBC has been doing its best to big-up this talented squad, and kudos to its crack team of broadcasters including (the unflappable) Gaby Logan, Alex Scott, Ian Wright and Jo Currie.
But there’s only so much politics and sunshine one can take.
Now is the time to really get behind the girls.
Brave move
SIR Mo Farah has revealed he’s been hiding the truth about his life for decades – and that even his name isn’t real.
It was a brave move, and he has been widely supported.
Presumably, though, his 2013 autobiography, Twin Ambitions, can now be found in the Fiction section of Waterstones.
CALLING all insomniacs! Forget Zopiclone. Scrap the meditation. Don’t bother with the bubblebath.
And feel free to keep devices running all night long
Because Don McLean has the answer. Explains the American Pie singer: “At around 2am I’ll wake for three hours, watch a movie, make an egg dish . . . and pour myself a little champagne.”
So that’s tomorrow’s dreaded dawn chorus sorted.
Sucks to be Henry
“A VICAR was caught thrusting into a Henry hoover while wearing nothing but a pair of women’s stockings.”
What. A. Sentence.
A vicar was caught thrusting into a Henry hoover while wearing nothing but a pair of women’s stockings[/caption]
And one doing the rounds in newspaper reports last week.
The article continued: “John Jeffs was spotted thrusting bare-cheeked into the suction nozzle of the happy-faced vacuum cleaner by a shocked churchgoer.”
John, who had been preparing, energetically, to give a talk on Asperger’s, has been found guilty of indecent exposure, fined, and ordered to sign the sex offenders register.
[To be clear, his complainant was the horrified church-goer, not poor Henry].
So, if you think you’re having a bad day . . . things could be worse.
Fun put on ice
CONFUSING times for purveyors of Mr Whippy.
While the men (and women) dishing out cones by the bucketload this summer must be loving a casual spot of climate change, they are still losing business.
Festivals, fairgrounds and seaside bosses are ordering them to cut carbon emissions – and turn their diesel motors into electric engines.
Which is all very well and good – but the eco-move can cost around £15k a pop.
As a result, Mr Whippy vans can now often only serve scoop ice cream or lollies – which is melting business away.
The Fun Police strike again.
Read More on The Sun
Heatwave warning
MEANWHILE women have been warned not to put ice lollies in their vaginas during the heatwave.
UK doctor Eleanor Draeger, a sexual health consultant, helpfully took to Twitter to remind us ladies not to self-regulate with a Calippo.
God. Won’t the Nanny State let us do anything?
