100% not our type on paper.
Trash but addictive, reality TV shows about love chart high in the entertainment genre. It may not be everyone’s first choice, but it definitely was for the 4.8 million people who watched Love Island’s most recent debut. Unfortunately, Love Island’s popularity doesn’t make it faultless. For a show heavily focused on physical appearance and attraction, it’s damaging to see the way people of colour have been represented.
Across all of the show’s six seasons, less than ten people of colour have made it to the final. Only last year, Amber Rose Gill won the show becoming the first person of colour to win. Gill herself is of mixed heritage, sparking a debate of how dark-skinned women and men are represented on the show.
Although there has been a noticeable increase in non-white contestants, the concern is not solely centred around numbers, but also the subliminal messages that the show gives to the public.
In every season so far, a black contestant has been picked last in the initial coupling. Malin Anderson in 2016, Marcel Somerville in 2017, Samira Mighty in 2018 and Yewande Biala in 2019.
In the most recent season, two black contestants Mike Boateng and Leanne Amaning coupled up with each other in the first coupling. This season also saw the third ever contestant of South Asian descent. Nas Majeed, of both Caribbean and Pakistani origin, was often friend-zoned on the show and was dumped on day 30.
For Reiss Smith, writer and advocate for race and LGBTQ+ equality, one of the biggest concerns about this trend is the impact it has on young, dark-skinned men and women. “They're being told that they are less attractive, less worthy than their white and lighter-skinned counterparts,” he says. “Although Love Island draws its problematic beauty ideals from wider society, it also reinforces them.”
For a show that’s most popular amongst young audiences, the repeated narrative of dark-skinned contestants chosen last sends out a concerning message. Anna Grey has run the modelling agency Model Students for ten years now. Being an agency that focuses primarily on students, she understands the impact that little to no diversity can have on younger audiences. “So many young people are heavily influenced by what they see in the media. A lot have role models who are reality TV stars and so it's so important for them to have role models that they can relate to,” she tells me. “If they don't, that can have a negative impact in terms of them trying to look and be different from the person that they are.”
According to data released by YouGov last year, 75% of Love Island viewers agree with the statement: “It is important for me to look physically attractive”, compared to 52% of the general population. For viewers who are more likely to value physical appearance, watching the show every night for six weeks of the year “can have a very powerful effect on their self-esteem” as Grey says.
Grey explains the growth that the modelling industry has seen. Although it still has a long way to go, she tells me it seems that reality TV is lagging behind in terms of the variety of people they cast. “Back when I first started the agency, it was really hard to have a diverse mix of models on the books. A lot of clients only wanted to book models who fit this very stereotypical image: skinny, pretty, white girl next door look,” Grey says. Back then, diverse looks would be ignored, which made it hard to put models on the books who didn’t fit the description that clients wanted. “It’s great that over the years, things have evolved and changed. There's much more of a trend to book people with different looks now,” she says.
But diversity can’t be seen as just a ‘trend’. Many who work in the industry recognise that long-lasting change starts behind the screen. Ofcom’s annual figures on diversity in the UK TV industry showed that 13% of staff at BBC, ITV, Channel 4, ViacomCBS and Sky come from BAME (Black Asian Minority Ethnic) backgrounds. But even within the BAME demographic itself, people from black backgrounds are less represented than people from an Asian background.
The Royal Television Society (RTS) is an educational charity for British television trying to change this. The RTS has a bursary scheme which aims to support people from lower-income backgrounds to pursue a career in TV and change the industry from the inside out. Working with this for six years, Anne Dawson speaks about the importance of diversity off-screen and accessibility to the industry.
“As the saying goes: if you can't see it, you can't be it,” says Smith. Reality TV isn’t everybody’s aspiration, but Smith says: “Having people of colour, queer people, disabled people and so on, on our screens fosters acceptance and inclusion. In the wider media landscape, the success of diversely-cast reality TV will surely influence decisions in other areas like scripted TV and film.”
Another reason for lack of diversity in the industry has been put down to budget and time. But, with Love Island being delayed this summer, will the extended time to plan and cast solve some of these issues? ITV have confirmed that Love Island will be back on screens with an extended run in summer 2021. Claiming it will be “bigger and better than ever” hopefully this means some changes in the casting of the show (where are the Asian women)?
But Smith believes reality TV holds a mirror to society and that the issues on the show aren’t specific to TV: “Racism and colourism exist in the dating world. Colourism within the black community is a hangover of colonialism and slavery. I'd be willing to bet money that if the initial cast was made up solely of black men and women, the first coupling would see a darker-skinned woman chosen last,” he says. “It's going to take more than an ITV2 show to fix generations of trauma.”