![]() The first time a boy came down and they said, "Step forward if you like him,” and no one stepped forward I was like "I can't not watch this, it's madness." Especially then, they were all such characters. When I saw the footage of the very first, original coupling on Season 1, I was like, "This is unbelievable." I couldn't believe how much I cared about everyone instantly. ![]() God's honest truth - the very first coupling. How long did it take for you to embrace the show? But it was on ITV2, which was just a small digital channel in the UK, so I thought, “Chances are, no one will watch it and I can just get a paycheck and no one needs to know I've ever done it.” But then it just went mad. ![]() You know, I always thought, “I'm going to be the next Bill Hicks, and do important comedy” This sounds… I hate that, "I nearly turned it down” story. I spend most of my day in the cabin, and then I drive 20 minutes to the nearest town, which is mainly affluent, retired Germans enjoying the sunshine and then just 200 British people in lanyards and matching shirts with no tan.ġ00%, yeah. It's about a five, ten minute drive in the villa. So the factory shuts down and Love Island moves in. I get put up in a porta cabin in a cement factory that goes vacant for July and August because it’s so hot that the cement sets too quickly. Yeah, this is my first year narrating from the UK. Normally, you’re at the villa in Mallorca this time of year? Now, it's things like, "Can you say these people's names in a different order because they're sat on a bed in this order?” We've also just started asking them beforehand, like, "Can we say this?" Saves us a lot of time. Me and Mark, my writing partner - he works for ITV Studios in development and he’s the guy who actually came up with the Love Island format, 50-year-old Scottish vegetarian, really interesting guy - we’ve just really got the tone down. In previous years, it might have been, "Redo this joke, please." That's pretty uncommon these days because the producers trust us more. I normally finish at about 5:30pm, and then between 5:30 and 9:00pm, I'm on call for edits, like a very unimportant doctor.Ī producer will call you and say, “fix this joke”? Iain Stirling: Yeah, I'm done recording for today but I could get called at any time. GQ: So you’ve just wrapped the narration for tonight’s episode. GQ sat down with Stirling to talk about the art of voicing Love Island, his own story arc, and his all-time favorite Islanders. Stirling technically isn’t the show’s host (that’s his wife, Irish TV presenter Laura Whitmore) and he never appears in the flesh, but his satirical voiceovers are the glue that holds the show together. With its loudmouthed cast, mind-boggling accents and horniness, the show is a breath of fresh air for viewers used to Bachelor Nation’s milquetoast contestants and stuffy self-seriousness. (An American version of Love Island flopped, and Netflix and HBO Max have since launched two hot-people-on-an-island-with-comedic-voiceover shows in homage, Too Hot to Handle and Fuckboy Island Netflix’s Sexy Beast also has narration from the comedian Rob Delaney.) Although the show was on hiatus last year, the old seasons became a go-to quarantine binge watch, and the new season finally began airing in July. ![]() It might sound like a generic reality TV premise, but Love Island UK exploded with a force in the US around 2018 after Hulu picked it up. Like many Americans, I’ve spent maybe a hundred hours with Stirling in my ear over the last year, narrating the movements of a dozen or so attractive twentysomethings, plucked from all over the UK to spend two months in a Mallorcan villa dating on camera. It’s bizarre to see Stirling, blonde and scruffy, seated in his home office under framed soccer jerseys and awards, rather than hearing him as a disembodied voice, suspended above a luxurious Spanish mansion. With assurance, he rearranges his thick Scottish accent into the punchy, stilted register that instantly transports audiences to the green astroturf of the Love Island villa, continuing: “In an exciting new marketing tie-in, this part of the show’s been sponsored by the word ‘feel’… not that you’ll notice.” “We’re doing a Sesame Street bit… are you sure it’s alright if I do this now?” he says. But now he has to add a last-minute line needed to stitch in a clip in which a contestant said ‘feel’ seven times in a minute. The 33-year-old comedian and narrator of the cult British reality TV show finished his voiceover for the evening’s episode an hour ago. “Welcome back to Love Island!” Iain Stirling reads off his iPhone into a huge microphone. ![]()
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