’Love Island’ narrator Iain Stirling has done nothing to stop the show’s rivalry with ‘Big Brother’, after insisting his series is more “relevant”.
‘Big Brother’ has suffered a blow at the hands of ‘Love Island’ since launching last week, with the Mallorca-based reality show running ahead in the ratings.
When HuffPost UK caught up with Iain for a chat about this year’s bunch of Islanders, he shared his thoughts on why ‘Love Island’ has grown to become more popular than Channel 5’s latest run of ‘BB’.
He said: “I think we’re more relevant. It’s summertime, we’ve got beautiful people, big characters, the villa is gorgeous. What do you want to watch - a load of people in the arse end of England in a little house, or just beautiful people with six packs running around a luxury, multi-million pound villa?
“It’s just more visually entertaining.”
Iain also made a subtle dig at the narration on ‘Big Brother’, which is provided by Geordie legend Marcus Bentley.
“Because of the way we do the voiceover, we can go in any direction,” he explained. “‘Big Brother’ is stuck in its ways now as it was a social experiment originally and with the voiceover, there’s only so many ways you can take it.
“We can do what we want with ours really.”
‘Big Brother’ drew just 1.1 million on Sunday (11 June), compared to the 1.4m who tuned in to see ‘Love Island’ on the same night.
The figure marked a series high for the ITV2 reality series, and is also well up on last year’s overnight figures.
Official figures from last week’s launches have also revealed that ‘Love Island’ actually beat ‘Big Brother’ when the two shows went head-to-head on Monday (5 June).
Consolidated ratings, which include those who watched on catch-up services, show that ‘Love Island’ actually attracted 1.9m viewers for its first episode - an increase of nearly 700,000 on the overnight figure. Big Brother’s numbers increased by just 300,000, taking it up to 1.6m.
Read the full interview with Iain here.
‘Love Island’ airs nightly at 9pm on ITV2.
