Show Hide image TV & Radio 14 July 2017 Why is Love Island so Tory? A conservative conspiracy in tiny trunks. Sign up for our weekly email * Print HTML Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Love Island as much as the next out-of-touch guilt-ridden liberal – but something sinister is bubbling beneath its smooth chlorine surface. In recent days, I’ve started shouting at the screen, not in my usual “THE RECOUPLING IS UPON US GIRD YOUR LOINS” way, but in the “No, junior employment minister, you are mistaken” way I reserve for chastising my radio. You see, much like The Muppets have been accused of left-wing propaganda, I am beginning to feel Love Island is a conservative conspiracy. Its tools of manipulation? Budget volleyball nets, tiny trunks and strip-lit dorms. Its enablers? The blind eye of the Majorcan authorities, and the entire British television-viewing public. Its agents? Men with ham arms and quiffs and the shiny women who have to endure them. It’s a sweaty, lurid conservative pageant – and we’re all watching. For those uninitiated readers still winding up their wirelesses, Love Island is a dating game show on ITV2. It’s sort of half Big Brother, half Take Me Out – or so they want you to believe. What it is really is a display of some of the most cringey passé social conservatism since Theresa and Philip May’s “boy jobs and girl jobs”. Except with other types of jobs too. Yes, when they’re not having sex on camera, they’re talking about who is. And yes, they are unbothered about quite how naked they always are. But this doesn’t mean they aren’t old-fashioned pearl-clutchers underneath it all. Putting aside that the island is a creepy conservative paradise of uniformly straight couples (no one is gay in this, unless they are being insulted), the contestants themselves are apparently mouthpieces of the old-school Conservative Party before David Cameron wafted in with his breadmaker and fruity ideas about equality. First, let’s look at the wooing – which is how they’d definitely describe it, being so behind-the-times. Or courting. One woman, called Camilla, looked doubtfully thrilled when her Calvin Klein model love interest informed her that he understood what was “going on in that little head”. She replied that she found him “interesting”, which is the sort of half-hearted response women in Georgian England had to give to bad-breathed vicars praising their aptitude at the pianoforte. Then there was an entire public proposal staged by the floppy-haired contestant Kem – because he wanted someone he had been dating for a couple of weeks to be his girlfriend. This is either piously straight-laced – no holding hands until we’re officially Boyfriend and Girlfriend! Two dates means we’re exclusive! – or just a very long-delayed Year Nine romance. It was done via numerous smartphones, after all. This whole show’s obsession with coupling up and locking your partner down is basically a feverish display of right-wing moral panic about “hook-up culture”; a pro-marriage broadcast. The term “wife material” does come up worryingly often. Further Tory dating methods on Love Island include asking other men’s permission for asking a woman out – or even asking permission to talk to one. Muscular Mike Pences, the lot of them. Then there’s the reaction to one of the men breaking down in tears. Poor Chris has been having a tough time on the island, missing home and battling gender norms by occasionally having the audacity to cry. When things unravelled with his Love Island wife, I mean, date, he was told in the final dumping salvo: “Don’t cry again because that’s the whole reason we’re in this situation.” Woah. Is Love Island really still stuck in a time when men don’t cry? When exactly did this backward little landmass break free from the mainland, and float off never to progress again? Was it during World War One when soldiers with shellshock were shot at dawn? Is there a whole separate house we never see, where left-handed contestants are being forced to write with their other hand, having their knuckles thwacked with a ruler? I know everything is dismissed as Brexit television these days. But this is truly it – a lonely little island taking us back to a time when conservative ideals reigned, and men who had their hearts broken would just grimace and take a bit of extra snuff at the club that evening. Love Island is Brexit Britain. Except in Majorca. › How to resist: what the success of the Living Wage tells us about forcing change Anoosh Chakelian is senior writer at the New Statesman. More Related articles SRSLY #102: Game of Thrones / Haim / Queen Anne Which Game of Thrones podcasts should you listen to? Doctor Who's Steven Moffat era will be remembered as a golden age Subscription offer 12 issues for £12 + FREE book LEARN MORE Close This week’s magazine
Show Hide image TV & Radio 18 July 2017 I never thought I wanted a female Doctor Who – until I got one Chi Onwurah on her love of the Time Lord – and why she's excited about the new one. Sign up to the Staggers Morning Call email * Print HTML You never forget your first. While others may have since risen higher in my affections – Star Trek, 2001: A Space Odyssey, even, if only for a short time, Blake’s 7 – Doctor Who was my first love in science fiction, and science fiction my first love on screen. It was the first joke I could remember the punchline to: Knock, knock! Who’s there? Doctor. Doctor Who? That’s right. I must have been about eight or nine and I’d already been terrified out of my young mind by the mutant maggots of Doctor Who and the Green Death. Still I did not think the gender of Doctor Who mattered so much. Perhaps because, while Tom Baker is definitely my favourite Doctor, (David Tennant a strong second), all of them, from William Hartnell to Peter Capaldi brought something magical to the part. There was so much variety in the men who played him, would it make that much difference if he was a she? Of course I wanted to push the boundaries of the roles woman actors could play but I saw little connection between that and my long-standing campaign to attract more girls and women into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (Stem). An engineer for 20 years before coming into parliament, ending the entrenched gender disparity in Stem disciplines – only 9 per cent of professional engineers are women – has long been a personal priority. Not only as a matter of social justice, but to give our economy better access to the skills it so desperately needs and make tech more balanced, more humane, more representative. I’m now the shadow minister for industrial strategy, science and innovation, and daily it is brought home to me that excluding half our population from the jobs of the future is an economic as well as a social dead end. I’ve long said women in Stem need high profile role models, and therefore championed everything from the most influential Women in Tech list to International Women in Engineering Day. Almost exactly one year ago Jeremy Corbyn and I invited 100 female engineers into his office for what was a fantastic celebration of the contribution women have already made to engineering. And I have always argued that better media representation of women in Stem could make a huge difference, and even called for a TV series about a complex, flawed but ultimately engaging woman engineer. But it did not occur to me that a woman starring in Doctor Who could have a role to play in inspiring girls. After all, the Doctor is a fictional, multi millennia-aged, two hearted, regenerating, time-travelling alien. Would a woman Doctor really be an easy-to-identify-with role model? Having seen the 55-second trailer for the new Doctor Who and been unable to prevent myself breaking into a huge smile as Jodie Whittaker was revealed, I now know the answer is, unequivocally, yes. We do not yet know what kind of Doctor Jodie will be, the exact mix of intelligence, humour, superiority and compassion. But we do know she will have ownership in four dimensions of an awful lot of complex technology – including a Tardis , which unlike Philip Hammond’s trains, has often proved itself too difficult for male Doctors to drive. Even if I had not been personally inspired by the new Doctor, the blatant sexism and more subtle misogyny of so much of the negative reaction would have convinced me that it mattered. So really, there are people out there who find being a woman the least believable part of the Doctor’s story? Whose lives will be materially worse if the fictional, multi millennia-aged, two-hearted, regenerating, time-travelling alien is not male? I’ve spent decades adoring 12 male Time Lords and they can’t bring themselves to even tolerate one female one? It reminded me of some of the response to John Boyega’s black Stormtrooper in the Star Wars galaxy a long time ago and far, far away. When fictional diversity brings on a major mind malfunction then you probably had a problem to begin with. So now I am left hoping that Doctor Who's Jodie Whittaker will slay a few sexist demons in her improbable journeys, as well as altering the dynamics around diversity in Stem. With a woman Doctor, literally, anything is possible. Chi Onwurah is the Labour MP for Newcastle upon Tyne Central, and the shadow minister for industrial strategy. More Related articles SRSLY #102: Game of Thrones / Haim / Queen Anne Lost in Austen: why does the new £10 note quote one of her characters instead? Which Game of Thrones podcasts should you listen to? Subscription offer 12 issues for £12 + FREE book LEARN MORE Close This week’s magazine