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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Love Island

01:22 / 06.07.06

I've asked this in the Questions To Which You Already Kind Of Know The Answer thread, but is anyone going to be watching Love Island?

The line-up has now been announced as follows:

Sophie Anderton (Model)
Bianca Gascoigne (Gazza's step daughter)
Kelle Bryan (out of Eternal)
Alicia Douvall (Glamour model)
Colleen Shannon (Playboy playmate)
Lady Victoria Hervey (Socialite)

Chris Brosnan (Piers's son)
Shane Lynch (out of Boyzone)
Lee Otway (off Hollyoaks)
Brendan Cole (Strictly Came Dancing)
Leo Ihenacho (The Streets)

Set to run in the post-BB 10pm slot from Monday. Will anyone be flicking over?

Whisky Priestess

12:32 / 07.07.06

Only if they change the name to the more accurate Son of Celebrity Love Island.

I mean, that's about the lamest "celebrity" line-up I've seen since ... well, the last series.

Just for you, however, I'll try and watch the first episode. Do they make contestants wrestle in mud or eat otters' spleens or anything? Because they should.

Regrettable Juvenilia

12:36 / 07.07.06

Leo the Lion?!? That's bizarrely obscure - I guess he sang the hook on a song or two that did very well, but it's a bit like having, I dunno, Dizzee Rascal's sound engineer on. Fix up.

13:45 / 07.07.06

Look closer, Whisky. It’s not called Celebrity Love Island this time round.
Think of them as regular people who you have a nagging suspicion you’ve seen around somewhere. So a bit like Big Brother.

The producer is writing a blog on the Guardian’s Organ Grinder (*snigger* etc), and is already getting a pasting, days before the show has even started. So, not just car-crash TV, but potentially a cross-platform motorway pile-up.

v

07:54 / 11.07.06

Soooo addicetd to Celebrity Love Island first time round. Caught last night's on telly by accident ..sat watching last night thinking.. who are these people. Thanks for the line up. What a bunch of specimens.

Whisky Priestess

09:01 / 11.07.06

Leo and Anita(???) climbing the coconut trees was quite cute.

Chris Brosnan is a braying twat. What does he do in real life? Fancy-free party boy perchance? Does he "own" a "club" or something?

Liked Shane asking not to be sent into the Love Shack cos he was getting on so well with the group.

Patrick and Fearne come across as unpleasant people and really quite poor presenters. Why do we keep cutting back to these idiots? Most of the nonentities/slebkids are far more charming. Although the guys keep bursting into tears and it's a bit ... unnerving.

How many votes do they get at the end of the show, d'you reckon? Like, if I text a couple of times, they'll basically do whatever I want, right?

12:55 / 11.07.06

It is frightening that the contestants have more interesting and significant celebrity than the presenters... Does anyone find Fearne Cotton anything other than intensely irritating?

I'm also finding it impossible to think of Lee Otway as anything other than Bombhead from Hollyoaks.

13:45 / 11.07.06

That's because Lee Ottway isn't anything other than Bombhead off Hollyoaks.

16:21 / 11.07.06

Fuck. I missed it.

Whisky Priestess

09:01 / 14.07.06

Shame on you. Still, I expect you can catch up on their steamy antics in The Sun - Official Newspaper of Love Island.

10:18 / 14.07.06

This is actually worth watching, in a rubber-necking kinda way. They make the Big Brother house look like a think tank.
Kiss ‘n’ Tell specialist and bandmate of BB’s Grace, Alicia Douvall, is just fantastically thick. She doesn’t know the alphabet. "A, B, C, D, E, F... J? S, M, L, N, O, T…?".
She can’t cook either (serving up a meal of baked beans on bread, garnished with grapes), earning the contempt of urban sophisticate Leo The Lion. "The way to a man’s heart is definitely through his stomach. If a girl can cook, looks good, and is good in the sack, she has nothing to worry about". The best way to Leo’s heart is, I suggest, through the chest with a garden trowel.

Uber-hetrosexual Lee Otway (who’s shagged over a hundred women!!!!OMG!!!!, 23 of them before he was 18!!!musthaveanenormouscock!!!!11!!!!!), is serenading the laydees with some beautiful songs of he’s written himself.

Brendan Cole has been demonstrating that there is a fine line between dancing and sexual assault – "You had no choice then… I manipulated you with my body".

Everyone hates Sophie Anderton.

It’s actually quite watchable. And that’s before Paul Danan (unlikely star of the last series) is parachuted back in on Saturday.

12:22 / 14.07.06

She seems to straddle the boundary between fantastically deluded and completely perceptive about how she's seen, Sophie Anderton, don't you think? Living embodiment of the maxim it's not paranoia if they really do hate you.

12:23 / 14.07.06

Oh, and it's definitely proving to be my summer's TV crack cocaine over BB. Heresy that that is.

09:14 / 16.07.06

I'm so glad it's not just me.. Somehow these shows keep finding their way on to our PVR..

The geography test was startling too. I mean, my geography sucks, but given a world map I'm reasonably sure I could find America. Especially if I lived there.

I have a sneaking feeling that Master Brosnan mostly makes a career out of being Pierce's son. He was almost oozing smugness "letting" um.. Kelle?.. "drag" his celeb connection out of him.

I find Shane's comparatively puritan attitude rather refreshing, but I'm a bit confused why, given that, he'd choose to go on this particular show? Also rather wearied by the general "oh oh it's too difficult, it's too mean" thing with the evictions. That's the game, people. What, you thought this was just a lovely free Fijian holiday? Nearly cheered for Lady V's pragmatism.

Other random opinions - Not liking Leo. All about the bodacious curves, bleh. No wonder he has "trust issues" in his relationships. Poor desperate Lee... Find myself rather liking Colleen, and being ashamed of the urge to pigeonhole her. Wondering what the fuss is about, with Sophie (I know nothing whatsoever about her); she's seemed relatively normal so far? (Have I missed something?)

I'm not sure whether it's more interesting to have Real Celebs (even minor ones) and have one's preformed opinions overturned (or confirmed) seeing them in a more day-to-day setting, or to have sons-of-celebs who are sort of, normal people with a twist. (Yes, I know everyone's Just People, but I'm struggling with putting the thought into words). They're often warped in interesting ways.

12:20 / 16.07.06

I have a sneaking feeling that Master Brosnan mostly makes a career out of being Pierce's son. He was almost oozing smugness "letting" um.. Kelle?.. "drag" his celeb connection out of him.

Stepson at that. I agree, Peek, some of the claims to celebrity remind me a little of the Six Degrees Of Separation thread. But I also agree that doesn't make them any less interesting. In fact it probably makes them more entertaining because they are trying to make names for themselves rather than protect their image.

19:01 / 18.07.06

OK, I'm a bad person, but I was grinning like a Cheshire Cat when Leo Didn't Get Picked. The Battle for Bianca is going to be interesting though..

I find it interesting that apparently all the men fancy Colleen like mad, but none of them are going for her and they're all going for Bianca. Is Bianca more accessible, or is there something Colleen lacks?

I absolutely hate Jackass, so I was prepared to loathe Stevo, but actually finding him rather pleasant, in that bizarre way that some American males have of being laddish and wise at the same time. (It does my head in. "You're a prat! Oh, no you're not.. Oh, yes you are! No you're not! ARGH!")

Starting to see the problem with Sophie now....

And once again - poor little Lee!

11:11 / 19.07.06

(OK, having seen the whole "disrespecting my drinks choices" debacle, I'm back to the not-so-much liking...)

Whisky Priestess

10:49 / 15.08.06

There's a lot of media coverage of this programme, and some of them do seem to be genuinely insane ... hmm.

Should I consider swapping my BB heroin habit for Love Island's methadone when Big Brother finishes on Friday?

14:32 / 15.08.06

I've been watching both - highlight shows only.

For my money, I've had a lot more laughs from Love Island. Crueller pranks from the production team, more layers of interaction from the contestants, far more convincing shifts of interest (I won't say loyalty!). The slebs are generally far tougher and more pragmatic than the BB lot, and pitch in cheerfully to most activities (whether gossip, task or drunken revelry).

The show even managed to make me feel bad for The Anderton yesterday, which I frankly thought impossible. (Mostly because the whole thing was _so_ engineered; and I think she came out of it rather well, all things considered. At least until the screaming hysterics, anyway.)

I think the LI contestants don't seem to form cliques so much, so there's more of a feeling of a tank of individual, brightly coloured, variably posturing tropical fish (with different lengths of teeth) - BB seems rather banal by comparison as they rush into little support huddles (and sometimes scamper to a different one).

21:30 / 15.08.06

See, for me it's all about the groupings...

10:30 / 16.08.06

Which is a shame, because if any show needs a commentary from a psychiatrist, it’s Love Island.

10:39 / 16.08.06

I watched a bit for the first time yesterday, which seemed to consist of two presenters (one of whom was Jayne Middlemiss, who I can't stand) burbling away and taking 'phone calls. Switched over after ten minutes.

Is Love Island strictly hetero, or are there other kinds of lerve up for grabs?

All Acting Regiment

11:14 / 16.08.06

Wow. That Brendan guy, on the yacht, dirty japes, flannel on the phallus in the phucking baphtub...I felt sorry for that girl, whoever she was. I know people who have had to put up with similar.

11:58 / 16.08.06

What you saw would have been Love Island Aftersun, although the presenters on the main show are, if anything, even more irritating and pointless.

All strictly hetero though. I’m not quite sure why. Maybe they couldn’t find any openly gay celebrities who are sufficiently unbalanced. Also, the limits of the format, which depends on routine pairing and re-pairing for 'dates', might have been prohibitive.

15:21 / 16.08.06

The girl on the boat with Brendan was Kate Lawler, winner of BB3.

16:58 / 16.08.06

See, for me it's all about the groupings...

I was thinking about this and in many ways, although the shows appear superficially similar (a group of strangers voluntarily trapped together) they really play out quite differently.

While in BB you have a bunch of (supposedly) Joe Public from All Walks Of Life thrown together to rally against Authority, in LI you have a bunch of folk already used to the public eye (well, perhaps the brief public glance) brought together to play Club 18-30 games.

I think part of the interest for me in LI is the gradual stripping away of the prepped exteriors, the differences (if any) between public perception and reality, and the adjustment of my own prejudices and preconceptions.

In BB you have the constant shifts and readjustments of people all adrift and trying to form alliances and seek some stability and a comfort zone in the face of a shifting population; in LI you have almost the reverse - they start out confident and polished, and that goes away over time leaving them much more vulnerable. The fact that the LI production team has been particularly cruel this year has accelerated that process.

18:04 / 16.08.06

I guess it's also about the queerness for me. Big Brother is one of the few reality shows which includes Teh Gays on a more-than-tokenistic level: there are different kinds of Gay, and some of them talk about liking sex - with people of the same sex! I find the shifting queer/non-queer interface(s) fascinating, and think I would miss all that if I jumped ship for Love Island.