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Love Island Is The Show That None Of Us Should Want

Different specimens spend their days lounging with their assigned mates. Occasionally they receive activities to participate in; a form of entertainment for them and the general public. They are deprived of many home comforts and live in relative ignorance of what goes on in the outside world. Within their confinement, they are largely oblivious as to how they are perceived.

What I just described was Love Island but if you were thinking about a zoo, society may have a problem.

However, the zoo to draw parallels with is not the ones of today that protect species, but the ones of old which exploited them. What the public want, the public get. In 1887, at the height of colonialism, ringmaster P.T. Barnum delivered. His freak show titled ‘Barnum and Bailey’s Greatest Show on Earth’, displayed those with genetic disorders as freaks of nature, and non-white people as ‘savages’, all done to satisfy Western audiences. An audience so blinded by entitlement, they failed to recognise those on display as other human beings. In 2019, nothing’s changed. How producer Richard Cowles, a 50-year-old white man, could have guessed that a competitive show about romance is just what millennials needed is beyond me. Nevertheless, in 2015 Love Island as we know it was born.