A modern Greek tragedy

I’VE been dipping in and out of this year’s season of Love Island. If you have not yet heard about the ITV2 reality show, in short it is Big Brother meets, well, Hollyoaks – but if Monday’s episode is anything to go by, a Greek tragedy playing out in a Thomas Hardy novel could better describe it. Am I being dramatic? Yes, but bear with me.

The show involves a group of bronzed demi-gods and goddesses in a Spanish villa playing out life’s oldest stories of love and heartbreak in front of a bewitched audience of millions.

On Monday night I tuned in after a two-week break and what happened really struck a chord with me – and everyone in my phonebook.

The show’s brutal final moments solely focused on the heartbreak and utter humiliation of one of the residents, a young woman called Georgia Steel.

In summary, the man she has become passionately smitten with jilted her for another one of the women in the house. But as a seasoned reality TV connoisseur, I have been wondering why this seemed to create such a visceral response in so many of us.

The answer I think is a relatively simple one. The young Georgia became a representation of the old and the new. A modern Tess of the d’Urbervilles, who like so many of us, placed herself at the mercy of a man, who like Angel in the book (albeit not quite as tragically) ultimately rejects her, leaving her broken and utterly humiliated.

But Tess’s saving grace of course is that she is a fictional tragic heroine set in the 19th Century.

Our modern heroine Georgia Steel, however, had to endure what seemed like very genuine heartbreak in front of her fellow Islanders on TV in front of more than three million people, some of whom were live texting their reactions on the three (yes three) Love-Island WhatsApp groups I have found myself in. ‘I feel such anxiety watching this, I think I am going to vomit,’ one message read.

‘This is so dark and brutal,’ read another. And there is no denying the spectacle of Georgia’s rejection was difficult to watch. So why is it that we can’t stop watching, I wondered? I’ve concluded that life’s juiciest bits, or our own experiences of heartbreak, are often too difficult to process, let alone study. To fully appreciate the lessons and nuances of our own experiences takes some of us years to process.

This reality TV show lets us pull up a chair and gives us permission to ogle, examine and analyse what it means to be young heartbroken and humiliated – safe in the knowledge that it isn’t us.