Greg Bruce reviews Love Island: Feeling the love

Wannabe couples in Love Island. Photo / ITV

A couple of weeks ago, my 20-year-old niece told me she had discovered a new show on TVNZ on Demand that, over the space of just a few days, had come to dominate her life. It sounded, in her enthusiastic telling, like the worst show in the world. It was called Love Island.

I assumed I would soon forget about it and it would disappear from my life - the last reality series I paid serious attention to was 2006's Rock Star: Supernova and even by then the genre was lifeless and riddled with cliche - but I could not shake Love Island.

I live in one of the most well-insulated of elitist Auckland media bubbles, from which I rarely look out, but over subsequent days, almost every time I did, it seemed, I saw the words Love Island.

At the time, the show was coming to its triumphant end in its native United Kingdom, where ratings and social media chat were going through the roof, and that country's most loathsome newspapers seemed to be carrying almost no other content.

A friend who works at The Sun told me that after the show's grand finale last week, the winning couple came into the office, prompting an outpouring of excitement the likes of which he'd never seen there before.

This is the third series of Love Island to screen in the UK and its popularity growth has been staggering. The final of the first series attracted 737,000 viewers, the second 1.3 million and this year's grand finale had nearly 3 million.

The central conceit of the show is to force a number of spectacularly beautiful people who have apparently never before met to publicly attempt to "couple up", with all the painful rejection, passive aggression and fake enthusiasm entailed in that exercise. If they aren't "coupled up", they're eliminated. They can also be eliminated by audience vote.

Watching the first episode at home, on my laptop, as I imagine the kids might, it was hard to pinpoint why it's been such an extraordinary hit. It certainly wasn't the characters' apparent moral deficiencies, nor their extraordinary looks, because those are the twin casting keys to any reality series. Nor was it the prize money: a hardly-worth-it-on-a-per-hour-basis 50 grand.

A couple of days ago, my niece tagged me in a Facebook post, which I later verified as true, that Love Island attracted 80,000 applicants this year - up from 18,000 last year - and more than twice as many applicants as Oxford and Cambridge universities combined.

This struck me as potentially the most important reason for the show's massive success. What could have a bigger impact on the quality of your output than the size of your talent pool?

And that question leads to another: From one of these groups of applicants, the future leaders of the country will be drawn - are the other lot taking notes in a university lecture hall or having sex in a luxury villa in Majorca?