Love Island 2018: What it's like to watch for the first time, with your teenage daughter

‘Love Island’ virgin David Barnett sits down to watch the new series of the televised ‘Club 18-30’ holiday with his teenage daughter, and can’t help but ask, where have the days of watching ‘Dora the Explorer’ gone?

It feels no more than five minutes since I was sitting down to watch endless episodes of Dora the Explorer – where basically the same thing happened every time – with my daughter Alice. But now here she is, a teenager, and we are watching Love Island together.

I am a Love Island virgin, which are three words you won’t hear together very much over the next eight weeks. I have never seen it before, and am only vaguely aware of it. That isn’t to say I’m some television snob; I’ve watched copious amounts of Big Brother. I do like I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!. I have caught myself laughing at Mrs Brown’s Boys. I even saw The Chase once.

But somehow, Love Island has been slightly beyond the periphery of my experience. I mean, I’ve never seen The Only Way is Essex, but I feel like I have. Love Island, though… my reality TV filter must be clogged, and the past three series of it have been caught up in the webbing, never really permeating even my subconscious mind.

I have a vague idea that Love Island is some combination of castaways having to undergo Bear Grylls-style survivalist trials crossed with the sort of orgy the Marquis de Sade might have dreamed about after eating a particularly pungent cheese too close to bedtime.

So, here we are, settling in front of ITV2, my teenage daughter and I. My wife questions the wisdom of Alice encouraging me to watch a programme which, she informs me, will feature a parade of nubile young women in bikinis, as though I am a pensioner in a comedy sketch who might have a heart attack. But I am insistent; Alice and her friends have been frantically Snapchatting all evening in excitement at the prospect of series four of Love Island. This will help me get down with the kids, I am sure of it.

I ask Alice for a brief précis of what it’s all about as the titles start. She tells me that there will be more boys than girls and everyone has to couple up but the spare boy then has to steal a girl from one of the others and at the end of the first round the boy without a girl is unceremoniously dumped from the show.

Are you embarrassed watching this with me, I ask. Alice shrugs. ‘Not on the first episode,’ she says. It will, I am told, get heavy later on. I am slightly aghast

How utterly awful, I think. And is there a point to it all? Apparently, yes; £50,000 for the last couple standing. And, apparently, “Instagram promotions”, whatever that might entail. But wait; monogamy is not the name of the game. Every so often there has to be a process of “recoupling”, says Alice, which sounds to me like something unpleasant from an episode of 1970s sci-fi series Logan’s Run.

This, I ponder, is going to be an interminable couple of months. Surely they must do something other than pant over each other? Yes, Alice says. There are tasks and challenges. What, like they have to catch fish and find coconuts and stuff?

She laughs. No, not like that at all. And as the first of the female contestants begins to arrive, I start to understand. This is not so much Bear Grylls as Bare Arse. The girls are deposited at a posh hotel individually, via Jeep, dressed in the teeniest, tiniest of bikinis. There is Samira, who is a dancer, Hayley, who is a model, Kendall, who manages a shoe shop. They are wearing a handkerchief’s worth of fabric between them. By the time Danny Dyer’s daughter rocks up, I am secretly wishing someone would put some clothes on. I must be getting old.

I lose track of who is who because I’ve had a sudden moment of dissonance. The voiceover guy has a Scottish accent that sounds awfully familiar. It is Iain Stirling, Alice informs me. “Don’t you remember? He used to be on CBBC.”

Oh my God. He’s the fresh-faced young chap who used to come on with Hacker T Dog. I always had a fondness for Hacker because he was from Wigan, like me. And now his mate Iain is narrating this cesspit. I look at my daughter, and remember those years of Tracy Beaker and Dora the Explorer. Truly, the days of innocence are over.

Back on screen, Eyal is indeed coming across as, relatively, deep. He is trying to explain to Hayley, the model, what the word ‘superficial’ means (ITV)

I ask Alice, cautiously, nervously, if she looks up to these girls, whose makeup has more mass than their clothing and who are talking about willies. She rolls her eyes. “It’s just entertainment, Dad.” I think there are five practically naked girls cavorting on screen now, but to be quite honest I’m eyeing up the fire pit on the sun terrace. Is it gas powered? Where does the canister go?

But here comes Caroline Flack, presiding over things like some brothel keeper in a Wild West frontier town. Because that’s exactly what it feels like when the boys turn up, one by one, like cattlemen who have been on the trail too long, excitedly wringing their stetsons and being invited by Flack to inspect the lineup of girl flesh on offer and take their pick.

Oh, the girls do have a tiny bit of agency; they are allowed to take a step forward if the boy in front of them takes their fancy. But ultimately, the guy gets to choose, though I am told these roles reverse in the coming days.

The boys are all rippling six packs and tattoos. There’s one called Niall, who seems sweetly funny, and a guy called Wes, who claims to be some kind of engineer in the nuclear industry, except he’s having trouble saying the word “nuclear”. He gives up and falls back on some double entendre, which I’m 100 per cent sure some researcher has not written for him, promising with a leery wink to “engineer the ride of someone’s life” and then, if that was a bit too subtle, says something about having a big gear stick.

My wife, no doubt thinking ahead to getting up at 6.30am today, wonders just how these people get eight weeks off work to do this. And that’s never more pressing a question than when Alex turns up. He’s an A&E doctor. How can they spare him? He’s presumably done six years of medical school so he can try to crack off with a girl on a televised Club 18-30 holiday. Doesn’t he know how hard-pressed the NHS is? Hasn’t he seen 24 Hours in A&E?

Half an hour in and I try to get into the spirit of things by betting my daughter a fiver (I know, I know, the sheer crimes of moral turpitude we have descended to) that a boy whose name sounds like Eeyore, but is Eyal, will pick Samira, the dancer, who seems quite switched on compared to the others. I lose the wager. I’m disappointed in Eyal. I thought he had more about him.

We meet Jack, who has the most astonishingly white teeth I have ever seen in my life. Apparently he went all the way to Turkey to get them done. You could see the glow of his teeth from the International Space Station.

I have drifted off when someone says, in what context I know not, that it’s “too soon to spoon!” Is it too soon to switch over and watch Lucy Worsley cosplaying a suffragette, I wonder?

The 2018 Love Island contestants: ‘By the time Danny Dyer’s daughter rocks up, I am secretly wishing someone would put some clothes on. I must be getting old’ (ITV)

By this point I am finding it all quite dreadful, and not because I’m old. It’s because it reminds me of what it was like to be young. If you were ever left standing tearfully at the end of musical chairs, if you ever were picked last for games, if you ever walked home alone from a disco and listened to “How Soon Is Now?” by The Smiths on repeat while staring mournfully at your Betty Blue poster, if despite your best efforts you could only ever cultivate the physique of Little Plum from The Beano, then Love Island is a hateful parade of everything you wanted to be but weren’t.

I look at Alice. God, I think, please don’t ever be so shallow as these people. But she’s on Snapchat with her friends. One of them likes Jack, he of the luminous gnashers. Alice pulls a face. Who do you like best, I ask? Eyal.

Back on screen, Eyal is indeed coming across as, relatively, deep. He is trying to explain to Hayley, the model, what the word “superficial” means. There’s a new guy arrived, called Adam, whose job is to break up one of the couples and get his chosen girl to be with him. It’s becoming like a standard night out, except there are no fights. Apparently giving someone who tries to steal your girl a good shoeing is verboten and gets you kicked out.

A little too late, perhaps, I start to wonder if this is really appropriate for Alice. But she has already seen the latest season of 13 Reasons Why, and also informs us that she has watched a movie called Ibiza that is trailed in the ad break which seems to be very heavy on jokes revolving around male ejaculation. Where did those Dora the Explorer days go? When Adam is going round trying to steal girls I want to shout at the screen, “Swiper no swiping!” But it would just make me sad.

Everyone goes to sleep, the “couples” sharing beds. They are young and full of self-esteem, and no one is in their forties and worried about snoring or accidental nocturnal flatulence. As far as I can tell, nobody has sex, which is a relief. It’s probably the best night’s kip Alex the A&E doctor has had for years.

Are you embarrassed watching this with me, I ask. Alice shrugs. “Not on the first episode,” she says. “I probably would be, later on.” It will, I am told, get heavy later on. I am slightly aghast. People will actually have sex? On the telly?

There was one couple that didn’t last year, says Alice. One couple that didn’t do it? Only one? I’m not sure whether to feel proud of them or sorry for them.

It feels like this is going to be a very long eight weeks, daily doses of people pretty much doing the same thing over and over again. A bit like Dora the Explorer. And even with the salacious promise of off-screen sex among these beautiful, vacuous people, I imagine it’s going to be less the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom than 56 Days of Sod All.

It’s too much time to devote to these people, and I’m afraid Alice might be on her own – with her pals on Snapchat of course – for the rest of Love Island. I gave it a go and it at best bored me, at worst made me feel vaguely angry and depressed.

Though I might tune in tonight, just to see who gets kicked out after last night’s cliffhanger…