If It’s on ‘Love Island,’ Britain’s Talking About It

LONDON — Scott Bell and Jamie Murray Pullan were sitting in the TV room of their student dorm recently, watching one of England’s most popular shows and pondering a pressing question of the moment.

“There’s no way he’s 22!” Bell said of Adam Collard, a contestant on “Love Island” who was on screen chatting with some women. “I don’t know why they aren’t staring at him, mouths open, going, ‘How are you 22? You look about 30,'” Pullan added.

It took the dogged reporting of The Daily Mail to put the national debate to rest, obtaining Collard’s birth certificate showing he was, in fact, just 22.

“Love Island,” now in its fourth season, is at first glance just another romantic reality show. A group of mainly 20-somethings from Britain are thrown into a villa on the Spanish island of Majorca for eight weeks. They are immediately forced to couple up, then six nights a week, the program documents their relationship ups and downs.

But “Love Island” has turned into a phenomenon here, bringing millions of viewers to a minor TV channel, stoking chatter from pubs to Parliament, and becoming the go-to show for people looking to assess the state of British life, or at least pontificate about it.

Last year, the prevalence of smoking in the show led to a debate in the House of Lords about whether broadcasting rules around smoking should be strengthened. (The program does not show smoking anymore.)

This season, Collard’s behavior has led to debate about how men treat women and accusations of “gaslighting,” a form of emotional manipulation.

Less seriously, the show has even been blamed for a trend: the disappearance of chest hair.

Some of the biggest rows surrounding the show have, often uncomfortably, focused on contestants’ intellect. Reality shows are not exactly known for high-minded conversation, but newspapers went into overdrive in June after one contestant, Hayley Hughes, a 21-year-old model from Liverpool, appeared not to know about Brexit, the term for Britain’s imminent departure from the European Union.

Shortly after Hughes was voted off the villa, Piers Morgan, a host of “Good Morning Britain,” asked her if she knew what Pythagoras’ theorem was — though it turned out he did not know himself.

A report that more people had applied to be on “Love Island” than had tried to get into Oxford and Cambridge provoked perhaps the strongest reactions. Giles Coren, a columnist for The Times of London, called the show “a vile, sexist, apocalyptically tasteless, immoral, sick, vomitous abomination, made by morons for morons.”

Objections aside, the show has been a genuine word-of-mouth hit for its broadcaster, ITV2, with audiences growing every season since its debut in 2015. It has been attracting some 3 million viewers a night, an enormous number for a lesser-known network. And it is drawing around 40 percent of 16- to 34-year-olds watching television in its time slot, a higher proportion of this advertiser-coveted audience than some major-network shows like “The X Factor,” according to Overnights.tv, a British ratings company.

Though “X Factor” and some other shows attract many more viewers overall, Stig Abell, editor of the highbrow Times Literary Supplement and a regular commentator on British life, said “Love Island” had made itself seem far more important — in part thanks to plotlines irresistible to the media.

“I think a lot of middle-class, middle-aged journalists like putting this preposterous intellectual scaffolding on it, saying it’s a bit like Shakespeare or Jane Austen,” Abell said. “It’s obviously not. It’s a lot of people with no body hair trying to get off with each other.”

Still, he acknowledged, “there’s pleasure in pruriently peering into people’s love lives, especially when they’re not wearing many clothes.”

There is more “Love Island” on the way. An Australian version is being filmed in another villa on Majorca. A second series of Germany’s (subtitle: “Hot Flirts and Real Love”) begins in September. Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish and Danish versions are starting this autumn. (The first three British seasons are available in the United States on Hulu.)

New viewers will not find the format hard to grasp. The villa is always on a European holiday island so hot that contestants want to wear bathing suits at all times. Once the participants are coupled up, the producers use every trick at their disposal to “test” successful relationships — from games to dates to having a pool of some 40 extra contestants waiting to be flown in at a moment’s notice, including some people’s exes.

The public decides on the winning pair, who are given two envelopes, one of which contains 50,000 British pounds (about $66,000). Whoever opens it can decide to keep it for themselves, or share it with their supposed love.

Richard Cowles, one of the show’s creators, said part of its draw is the ability to see relationships forming and breaking apart in real time. “We can all look at everyone else’s relationships, all of our friends, and we say what’s right and what’s wrong — that’s what everyone’s doing when they watch the show,” he said in an interview last month at the production site in Majorca.

If some people write off the show as a tasteless celebration of hookup culture, Cowles notes that two former contestants are getting married this summer, and that another couple had already had a child. He said the show is “honestly, genuinely trying to cast people who are looking for love.”

Of course, it does not hurt ratings when the camera catches them finding love beneath a comforter. As Pullan, the fan, put it: “It’s such trash you just get sucked into it.” Collard’s love life in particular has sucked in the British public this season.

A chiseled, 6-foot-4 personal trainer from Newcastle, Collard assumed the role of the reality-show villain. One recent afternoon, after finishing a cigarette off-camera, he walked over to the villa’s pool and chatted with Jack Fincham, a stationery salesman, about the grief he was getting from Rosie Anna Williams, a lawyer from Wales he had just dumped, even though they had an under-comforter experience. Williams sat nearby, in tears.

In a pitch-black cabin just yards away, Mike Spencer, one of the show’s editors, watched it all happen on one of the 83 video feeds he has at his disposal to create that evening’s one-hour show.

“We’ve all been a Rosie,” he said with a sigh.

Collard’s happiness to chase women, while stringing along those he was already with, has stirred examination of male behavior in relationships. Williams was his second partner, but he expressed interest in two other women while with her.

Women’s Aid, a charity, called Collard’s actions unacceptable. “In a relationship, a partner questioning your memory of events, trivializing your thoughts or feelings, and turning things around to blame you can be part of pattern of gaslighting and emotional abuse,” the group said in a news release last month.

He did apologize on-camera to Williams, and appeared ready to redeem himself further, becoming genuinely enamored with his next partner, Zara McDermott, a civil servant.

When she was voted off by the other housemates, Collard even expressed a desire to leave with her.

Within three episodes, he was kissing a new partner, though he later confessed that he still had feelings for McDermott.

He can now find out if she still has feelings for him. On Thursday, he was voted off.