A Love Island live blog!

Welcome to this special edition of Striving for Apathy: a Love Island live blog! With a difference!

The difference is it’s not live: it’s Tuesday morning, I’m in the office blinking at ITV Player, and in the unlikely event some fucker gives me work to do this shite might bleed over into Wednesday. There might be the occasional uncharacteristic exclamation mark beneath, in case some OK magazine-reading twat stumbles across this, thinks it’s a seriously fresh insight into their vacuous world and shares it on Instagram where, as you and I both know, I truly belong.

So, a little background before we begin! I’ve never seen Love Island and I don’t know what it is; I assume it’s some sort of hyper-randy Blind Date. Morons are obsessed with it. I know that a pair named Amber and Greg won it last night, because the front page of a moron’s Metro said so just now.

Let’s go!

Well, there’s an intro for our times. Someone’s yelling “love sensation” over empty electronics as a stripy woman strides past a lady in pink admiring a man fondling a toy elephant. Even with my limited experience of ITV in 2019 I can already sense we’re deep into some of Freud’s most complex work. There’s a lot of gleaming pearly whites; someone has their hat knocked off. This bloke looks like a prop forward with learning difficulties.

Oh the stripy woman is the host. I didn’t know there was a host, I figured it was just people sprawling semi-naked on rocks with commentary from someone reverential. John Virgo maybe, or that quiet chap who does the golf.

They win fifty grand for this she says. Between them? Doesn’t seem like much given their lucrative endorsements probably won’t last the winter, leaving the man with the elephant opening Road Chefs on weekday lunchtimes and sticking his trunk into whatever might get him one last tragic headline in the Daily Star.

Now they’re introducing the finalists, but they’re couples. That’s confusing – did they start as couples when they entered? No time to wonder as I now see ‘the villa’ for the first time and oh Christ they sleep in a giant dormitory together, all of them. They’re leaping across each other’s beds and rolling about in a sexless mashup of Bananas in Pyjamas and infinite Carry Ons.

“Guys I’ve got a text!” Tonight is the summer ball, the residents are told. Two people in black turn up to teach them how to Samba – people can get in, it seems. This isn’t like Big Brother where they’re stuck in an isolated bunker to watch George Galloway and Jade Goody fight to the death because that’s how I choose to remember it. I saw an advert for a Jade Goody documentary the other day as humanity continues to discover new crypts of shame to loot.

This dancing bit is shambling on and on. They’re all moaning they’re shit at it and I can’t disagree. But wait, here’s another text! The girls have to go somewhere to buy dresses for the ball. They’re allowed out as well? What kind of tinpot Alcatraz is this?

Meanwhile the men continue to leer pleadingly at the cameras and the adverts come as no little relief. The show’s sponsored by Uber Eats, presumably to whittle down the pool of future island-dwelling imbeciles by filling them full of tikka masala.

The ladies are dress shopping in Mallorca! So the island is Mallorca? This is highly unsatisfying. I pictured the island that the winner of the Running Man is sent to, or at least somewhere the locals might pose a genuine threat, like Anglesey.

The Scottish narrator is starting to get on my wick as he squeals that we’re approaching ball night. The contestants are getting what the stripy woman calls ‘totes emosh’. I would have every person who has ever said ‘totes’ killed by samurai.

Each couple are at their own garden furniture pretending to stare longingly at one another, apart from Ovie and India who are making the most disgusting kissing noises since that bloke snogged the old dear with no teeth on The Word. “I’ll do anything to get on TV” he said, and thus the cry of the ages was foretold.

The men are now reading paeans they’ve written to their walking lipsticks. The first time I hear the word ‘princess’ I feel a contraction lower in my body and it turns out I need a piss and will have to miss this segment, which is a real shame.

I’m back! They’re all now jumping into a swimming pool in their suits and ball gowns. I feel I’ve missed an important element of the show, namely the part where someone explains what in the holy fucking Christ is going on.

But wait: a highlights package! This is now showing me what I’ve missed and how it works. They go in single and ‘couple up’, though how they work out who gets who is left tantalisingly unexplained. Perhaps there’s a sinister scientific plot behind all this, genetically matched beautiful idiots procreating under the watchful gaze of megalomaniacal supervillains Karl Stromberg and Tony from Hollyoaks.

People get voted out by our beloved centre-right British public, so with a black man in the final we may be looking at levels of electoral credibility akin to a Central Asian republic. New people arrive, smooth as torpedos, to destroy the careful harmony engineered precisely for its destruction. Moira says to some squinting halfwit: “I wish we could just sleep out here, so you could warm me up”. Then she says something that sounds like “fanny flutter” as though she’s reading the actions out loud off the Autocue.

There’s penetration, sadly implied, and tears, sadly not. People dump each other and get together in ways that could be scripted, or not, or based on girth or swearing ingenuity or a number of other grim Top Trump categories. More than anything else there’s pretend teenagers dribbling out inanities like “Will you be my girlfriend?” and “I really like you”, presumably to blind us to the very grown-up marketing machine behind each of these pointless ‘celebrities’.

Back to the sofa – voting has closed! Presumably now the androids can be switched off.

They’ve started to announce the results in (very, very slow) reverse order. Curtis has learned a lot about himself, and he has to be 100% true to himself, and he has to enjoy his time. Insights indeed. Moira Irishes the fuck out of it with the deadest eyes since Martin Bormann. India finds out that making squid noises while clamped onto a bloke doesn’t play well in the polling booth, and a special shout out to Ovie for saying he’s not the sort of guy to “force myself on anyone”. Well done Ovie, well done. The other two losers are Tommy and Molly Mae but who fucking cares at this point because Amber! And Greg!

There are no actual crowns. Disappointing. But what’s this? By some convoluted envelope process, Greg now has to decide whether to keep the whole fifty grand, or share it with Amber. This is great! It’s like a real gameshow! Share or Shaft!

The problem is that if Greg couldn’t give a flying fuck about Amber and he keeps the money, everyone will think he’s an outright bastard and his profitable advertising deals will drift away like a child at a garlic festival. He’s going to say he’ll share it. He’s sharing it. Cunt.

With one simple act of altruism, because that’s surely what it was, Greg has shown me that I can never be a true fan of Love Island. I love the glamour and the romance of it, of course I do, and the outfits and that, but if it’s become so successful that the money these grim wankers will make from it outweighs the extra 25k they’d earn for pulling a very successful fast one for many weeks, they’ll struggle to engage the huge section of the population who are evil scum like me.

And so ends what I hope you’ll consider was a successful live blog! When Moira and Molly Mae share this without reading it please upvote me in the likes or whatever the fuck you social simpletons do so I can get popular, rich and disown everyone who got me there.

Right, when’s BGT on?

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