TELLY TALK WEEKLY: Viewers’ Letters Page August 1985
This week’s postbag was the biggest we have known since the dispute over the snooker final overrunning the news. Almost every envelope, it seems, concerned one programme: Love Island, the new Sunday-night series. Few British TV shows have filled our postbag quite so quickly. in which a dozen young singles are packed off to a sunny villa and asked to find romance in front of the cameras. The resulting Love Island Sunday Evening Debate has filled our postbag all week. Here is a selection of your letters, printed with some editing for length.
“Where are Their Parents?”
“Sirs, I watched the first episode with my husband and a pot of tea, and I have not been the same since. A dozen young people, most of them barely out of school, sent to live in a foreign villa with no chaperone. It certainly leaves me asking, Is Love Island Suitable for Sunday Evening viewing at all? Every one of them was in a bathing costume, and I counted only three cardigans in the entire series. I ask you, who is minding them?”
— Mrs D. Pemberton, Leamington Spa
“A Young Man Must be Allowed to Wear his Trunks”
“Sir, I write in defence of the programme. My daughter and I have watched every night, and we found it thoroughly harmless. The young people talk, they sunbathe, they occasionally cry into a glass of lemonade. It is no different to a school trip to Frinton, except the weather is better and the girls have better hair.”
— Mr R. Aldous, Chelmsford
“The Rules Baffle Me”
“Sirs, would someone explain the rules? Each week the young men and women are made to ‘pair off’ and are then sent home if nobody wants to sit next to them at dinner. In my day, if you were left at the dance without a partner, you simply went and got a sausage roll. I fail to see how this makes good television. Judging by the Love Island Audience Complaints already being discussed in our household, I cannot be the only viewer left puzzled by the whole arrangement.”
— Miss E. Harkness, Perth
“The Narrator is the Best Thing About it”
“Sir, may I be the first to praise the gentleman who speaks over the pictures? He is witty without being unkind, and I have laughed more at his remarks than at anything on Saturday evening. It is the sort of dry British humour that makes the programme far more entertaining than I expected. Please can we have more of him? It may be interesting to see how other Viewers React to Love Island, but in this house the narrator has certainly won our vote.”
— Mr T. Bellingham, Stockport
“What is this Doing to the Youth of Britain?”
“Sirs, my son has taken to using a sunbed every Tuesday and asking me whether his hair ‘sits right.’ I put it down to this programme, and I hold your channel responsible. He has also asked whether we might go to Majorca for the fortnight instead of Bridlington. I blame the villa.”
— Mrs G. Whitcombe, Wolverhampton
“A Silver Lining for the Tea-Time Telephone”
“Sir, our household has been unable to use the telephone on Sunday evenings since the series began. Every girl on our street is ringing every other girl for a Sunday Night Love Island Discussion about who has ‘gone off’ whom. The telephone bill this quarter was £41. Perhaps the producers would consider a contribution.”
— Mr K. Ollerenshaw, Bolton
A Word From the Editor
We have never before received so many letters on one series, which says something either about the programme or about the state of Sunday evenings in British households. Whichever it is, we shall keep printing audience views on Love Island as long as you keep licking the stamps (twelve pence second class, if you were wondering). If the letters tell us anything, it is that television has become firmly woven into everyday British life.
Write to us at Telly Talk Weekly, Letters, PO Box 85, London. Please keep your remarks under one hundred words, and please be kind to the young people, who are, after all, only trying to find love and a decent tan.
