I watch Love Island in secret — in the kitchen while I’m making dinner or with my laptop propped up on the handles of my exercise bike in my bedroom. I might pedal half-heartedly and watch an argument unfold between one bikinied woman and another about who is the fake one, who is the one who “stands on business” and who will always “say it with my chest” (not what you think. Checks notes: something about speaking your truth).

When I told my colleagues this, even the twentysomething Gen Z ones looked aghast. Love Island is so 2019, they insisted. There hasn’t been a good season since Molly-Mae left with Tommy Fury and a multimillion-pound career. And was I OK?

I don’t know. Am I? I’m 38 years old. I wake up to Radio 4. Right now on my way into work I’m reading The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell, a Women’s Prize shortlisted novel. Or I’m scrolling one of three news apps on my phone. I’m keen on politics and current affairs. I spend my working days at my desk editing serious features. And I love love triangles.

Gen Z might be the target audience for the long-running ITVX reality series, whose 12th series finished this week. It was a runaway hit online this year: 13 million people follow Love Island accounts on social media and there were 87,000 video uploads on TikTok, 30-second clips watched in turn by millions. Yet I’ll wager that a good portion of the stalwart 1.2 million traditional viewer figures (down from its 2019 peak of 6 million) are exhausted geriatric millennial mothers. It’s the TV version of Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time. Reassuring, soporific, it asks nothing of me.

My husband and I work full-time, look after two kids under five and run a daily relay of nursery pick-ups and drop-offs, then trains to and from the office. We stare at departure boards and hope to God this one won’t be delayed. By the time one of us is home and has reheated whatever dinner we have batch-cooked for the kids at the start of the week, done their bathtime, books and bedtime, I for one don’t have it in me to watch a big, serious prestige drama.

Luckily for me, Love Island is on most nights and I can store up episodes. There’s nothing easier than the endless repetition of hearing one contestant say earnestly and pointlessly to the object of his affection around a fire pit: “You’re beautiful inside and out.” And there’s nothing more inevitable than the narrative arc of the final weeks of the series, when the last couples all go “exclusive” and we see the ritual of women jumping up and down and congratulating whichever friend has just been “wifed off”.

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I even like the audacity of the show’s bad boy Harry, who shakes his head whenever a new girl enters the villa. He might have told one woman their connection was “undeniable” but that was 30 minutes ago. Now he is about to flirt with this new bombshell. He turns to his fellow male contestants as he eases himself off the sunbed and says gleefully, regretfully, “This is no good.”

I agree, it is no good. And yet Love Island is the perfect dead-eyed content to watch passively, between hauling one mixed-up pile of still sodden laundry onto the side to sort through. I never watch it in real time, only ever an episode at a time a few days later on ITVX’s catch-up, so I haven’t yet seen the final in which (spoiler alert to self) Toni, the outspoken Vegas drinks girl, and Cach, the gentlemanly dancer from London, take home the £50,000 prize. Frankly, it doesn’t matter to me who wins.

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I feel somewhat vindicated that Caitlin Moran recently revealed on these pages that she is watching the show too. This series, she notes, has a particular undercurrent of misogyny. It’s best captured by the phrase “you’re trouble” — something the boys use on the girls all the time. It’s a sinister compliment, the subtext being: “With your good looks, you’ve asked for this.” And then there is their bad behaviour of playing one woman off against another. True to form, for much of the series the women argue among themselves, forgetting that the men are the cause of the fallout.

My husband can’t stand Love Island and I hate watching it while he’s in the room — the eye rolls and sighs coming from the other side of the couch are too annoying. He’d rather watch the Tour de France highlights.

That’s when I retreat to my exercise bike for the belated next instalment of who’s been dumped from the villa.

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