An Oral History of 'Celebrity Love Island'

“There wasn’t a moment that sucked,” Calum tells me over the phone, in between long vape rips. The TV set that producers had built on an abandoned package holiday resort was, for a tabloid celeb in the mid-noughties, utopia.

Celebrity Love Island, which ran for two seasons in 2005 and 2006, was commissioned by ITV as a rival to Channel 4's Big Brother, which had dominated the headlines since it began in 2000. While today's reality TV landscape is very different (BB wrapped its final season last year, and Love Island – a re-do of the Celebrity Love Island format, but with normies from Blackpool who have 48k on Insta – has dominated the cultural conversation for the past two summers), back then, ITV needed to compete with the Big Brother behemoth. What they came up with was Celebrity Love Island, a programme that chucked the cream of Heat magazine-fodder into a Spanish villa, and asked us to watch them try to fuck each other.

Joining Calum and Rebecca (the Beckhams’ PA who allegedly had sex with David, before tossing off a pig during an appearance on Channel 5’s The Farm) on Celebrity Love Island season one was Page Three girl Abi Titmuss, Westlife’s bodyguard Fran Cosgrave, Atomic Kitten member Liz McClarnon, Hollyoaks’ Paul Danan and ex-Manchester United player Lee Sharpe. Season two saw Calum and Paul return, alongside Alicia Douvall, Steve-O of Jackass, model Sophie Anderton, and Paul Gascoigne’s step-daughter Bianca. But despite ITV investing two million pounds into the production, at one point during its first series, Celebrity Love Island garnered just two million viewers, compared with Big Brother’s seven million.

Ultimately, the show had failed to compete with Big Brother’s sixth and seventh seasons (which featured such classic moments as Kinga masturbating with a wine bottle and Kieron hiding foot scabs in his rival’s food). Back then, the public was clearly not enthused by the wholesome escapism of watching hot men in ripped jeans fall in love. Now, people pay £20 for Love Island water bottles, and dads everywhere find that "muggy" has entered their everyday vernacular.

To celebrate the return of Britain’s most treasured broadcast on Monday 3rd June, I wanted to find out about where it all began. I spoke to contestants, producers and tabloid journalists involved in the original Celebrity Love Island series – the cursed ashes from whence our beloved shagging programme rose – about their experiences of the show. What was it like leaving the island at a time when it was the Daily Mail and not social media trolls who called you fat? Why was everyone so angry about people being famous for no reason? And how did a mid-noughties flop become what is now the Premier League of reality TV?

When she heard about her son Calum’s decision to feature on Love Island, the former Playboy bunny Angie Best was nervous. “She warned me not to do anything stupid,” Calum tells me. “And my friends were like, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’” Calum’s family were right to be sceptical. In the 2000s, reality TV signalled the end of a career rather than the beginning of it. It was where celebrities went to mend their public image after some casual racism, or to bolster retirement funds (it was that or a Santander ad). Think Gillian McKeith, the woman who rifled through poo, going on I’m A Celebrity after we got bored of watching her fat-shame northerners.

“At the time, I was with a modelling agency called Select who found me high-end work,” Calum continues. “I was shooting for GQ and going to award shows. They asked me, ‘Are you really willing to risk your career just to get on this programme?’ But I was young. I thought, 'I’ll worry about what I look like once it’s over.'”

Despite the tabloids’ complaints that the show was “boring dross,” both original Love Island seasons had their fair share of drama. An entire bottle of sauvignon blanc was poured over Sophie’s head after she snogged her mate’s crush, Pierce Brosnan’s son Chris. In series two, when Colleen Shannon – a DJ and Playboy model who brought 28 bikinis with her to Fiji – rejected soap star Lee Otway, he stormed into the diary room and smashed thousands of pounds worth of camera equipment. And at one point, it looked like Abi Titmuss and Rebecca Loos were going to shag: while Abi ate chocolate cake, Rebecca told her, "I could help you burn that off in one night,” before adding, "What I need to do is tie you down and make love to you. You would never be the same woman again.”

Most of the excitement of Celebrity Love Island season one, however, was related to Paul Danan, or "Dangerous Danan" as he became known. Fran Cosgrave remembers a time when he almost came to blows with Paul. “When I came out, my Mum was like, ‘I’m so glad you didn’t hit that boy’,” he tells me. He clashed with Paul after the actor had been slurring rude comments at woman cast members. “He got right up in my face but then security separated us. He was screaming and blinding while being dragged away.” At one point, Paul became so volatile that the other contestants refused to sleep in the same room as him.

Colleen says her wildest moment came when producers brought in Jackass star Steve-O. “He poured milk under the fridge and left cheese everywhere and sat in the kitchen for 36 hours to see if any lice or animals would crawl out. Sure enough, they did. Then he took his pants off and tucked his junk in between his legs and did a backflip.” Steve’s sunny mood quickly changed after producers refused to bring him more alcohol. In the end, he only lasted only three days.

It’s difficult to imagine Steve or Paul being asked to feature on Love Island in its current incarnation, especially as producers have recently ramped up the show's mental health checks and procedures. Paul recently admitted that he was suffering with drug withdrawals during his time on the show. “I remember actually crawling to the beach hut in the first few days and I was shivering and shaking, going, ‘Oh my god, I don’t know what’s going on with me,’” he told the Teenage Diary Podcast. He has also alleged that he was given Valium by producers to calm him down: “It just chilled me out and the next day, I was fine.”

And according to Celebrity Love Island executive producer Natalka Znak, Steve wasn’t stable during his time on the show, either: “I’ve had several conversations with Steve since,” she tells me. “He barely remembers being there.”

Compared to this decade’s Love Island – in which members regurgitate spaghetti Bolognese down each others' throats, or insert handfuls of hot dogs under bikinis, the original Love Island tasks were far less sexual. Instead, they involved puzzles, presumably intended to make the cast members look stupid. In one game during the 2005 season, Lady Victoria Hervey – "it" girl and daughter of the sixth Marquess of Bristol – failed to identify America on a map, even though she lived there. Hayley Hughes’ suggestion that Brexit means "no cheese" on last year’s Love Island seems scholarly in comparison.

With a big budget and more casual approach to health and safety, Celebrity Love Island also had very different rewards for winning tasks. Calum and Rebecca swam in the sea with manta rays and dolphins. Colleen and Lee scaled a 150-foot line between two mega-yachts, while Fran and FHM "Sexiest Women in the World"-regular Jayne Middlemiss went cave-diving in tunnels underneath a volcano.

However Fran tells me that these once-in-a-lifetime treats could turn sour: “At one point [during the cave dive], the camera man’s lights went out. Everything went pitch black and we were perching on these sheer walls which you couldn’t hold onto. I remember Jayne screaming. We were in an abyss of death and you just had to keep holding on.” Eventually, the lights came back and the couple abseiled to safety. “Jayne got her rope tied up and ended up swinging around upside down off the side of this mountain,” Fran adds.

His date certainly sounds more eventful than those of the 2010s Love Island, in which rewards usually involve two estate agents discussing eye colour on a picnic blanket in rural Mallorca, drinking Prosecco out of plastic glasses.

Unfortunately, filming was significantly less exciting for those behind the scenes. Natalka had to work until 7AM to ensure that the programme was edited and polished for the next day. “The crew were staying at these all-inclusive resorts,” she explains. “I remember trying to sleep at 11AM and there were tourists playing volleyball in the pool.”

Not everything went to plan. In season two, Natalka had to dig into the production budget to pay villagers to tether their animals after a few near misses driving camera equipment around at night. When a new entrant, model Emily Scott, had her hair blow-dried at a local salon, the hairdresser managed to tangle her expensive blonde weave into matted ball of fuzz. Natalka ended up flying a hair extensions specialist in from Australia.

Even with Steve-O’s wild antics and Alicia Douvall failing to prepare beans on toast, Love Island was slated in the papers throughout both seasons. Charlie Brooker dubbed it, “The show that makes the score from Requiem For A Dream start playing in your head.” And even though his son featured on the show, for George Best it was, “one of the worst programmes ever made.” So, what was going wrong?

Peter Dyke, a showbiz and TV reporter at The Daily Star at the time, places some of the blame on the lack of chemistry between presenters Kelly Brook and Patrick Kielty (who were reportedly not getting on after Patrick told viewers that Kelly used to date Islander Paul). Peter also surmises that much of the failure of the show lies with what he saw as an underwhelming cast. “Viewers were a bit disappointed by the calibre of celebrities, so much that they dropped the term ‘celebrity’ from the [title of the] second series,” he tells me. “The press started calling them 'wannabes' because so many of them were keen to become famous.”

Back in the mid-2000s, being "famous for no reason" was still a relatively new concept and one that was met with much criticism. The idea of someone like Abi Titmuss going from being a nurse in Lincolnshire to owning a gold snakeskin Michael Kors bag without having first legitimised herself via a career in acting or music was seen as a violation of the social order. Women like Katie Price, Jade Goody and Jodie Marsh were accused of corrupting teenagers, creating a cult of silicone, dulled aspirations and bleach-blonde hair.

Journalists were also bored with the celebrity format and took their frustrations out on Love Island. The Guardian bemoaned the existence of shows with, “celebrities on horses, celebrities on ice, celebrities in the sauna.” For Natalka, these criticisms were never about the quality of Love Island, but rather a political attack on ITV and the lighthearted entertainment it made.

“People were constantly saying, ‘TV is crap, it’s rubbish now, it’s not like it used to be,’" she says. "Criticism of the show was always in the context of, ‘Oh, TV used to be brilliant in the 70s and now we have to watch this shit’.” Back then, Love Island was seen as cheapening culture. Today, it is compared to Brecht’s theatre and lauded as a social experiment reflective of the current zeitgeist.

As their turns on Celebrity Love Island ended and the set was left to gather dust, most of the cast found it difficult to return to a world now hungry for a piece of them. Colleen became convinced producers had secretly bugged her hotel room and the stress of looking good for the press drove her to work out so obsessively that her breast implant exploded. “My breasts developed scar tissue and ended up erupting after that," she tells me. "If you're working out too hard on your chest muscle your body just rejects it and I literally woke up one morning with one boob.” Never one to call in sick, Colleen still flew out to DJ at a club in LA. “I remember stuffing my bra with a sock or a tissue. There was a jacuzzi after party with all these cute boys and I just had one boob.”

Aside from body parts popping like whoopie cushions, much of the pressure on contestants came from the unrelenting tabloid scrutiny. It was similar to the trolling we see now on Instagram, where ex-Islanders have to cope with Mark from Inverness asking if their dad’s proud of them. Today, the tabloids are meek, content to remark on contestants looking "fresh-faced" when leaving the gym, or analysing a "pert posterior" as someone gracefully steps over a puddle. But in the noughties, showbiz journalism was much nastier. This was the era when Heat magazine had a whole section dedicated to a “hoop of horror,” zooming in on celebrities’ cellulite, snotty noses and camel toes. The Leveson Inquiry of 2011 and 2012 – an investigation into the ethics of the UK press – had not yet happened, meaning that tabloids were ruthless in their coverage. Unsurprisingly, most of the Celebrity Love Island cast were offered up as public sacrifices by the red-tops upon leaving Fiji.

The Mirror printed an article about Sophie under the headline: “SEX-MAD star Sophie Anderton lashed her lover to the bed during a kinky romp - and was nearly caught in the act by her mum and dad.” After her weight was mocked on the show, The Daily Record wrote of Abi: “Abi’s not just a pair of boobs… She’s a big fat belly as well.” Right after Paul endured a heroin overdose, The Daily Star ran the headline, “Paul’s a total maniac: Ex-lover tells of crazed Danan’s drug lust.”

For Calum, being repeatedly labelled a “sleazy lothario” trampled his self-esteem. His missteps were constantly dredged up: the time he was found snorting cocaine in a hotel room with sex workers when he was in a relationship with Lindsay Lohan; the CCTV footage of him committing “sex acts” on a fire escape with Mick Jagger’s daughter Elizabeth. Eventually, he started to live up to the caricature that people painted of him, going out and drinking all the time because he believed that was all he was good for.

“'What even is his purpose? Look at him spending all of his Dad's millions,'" Calum says, impersonating his critics. “'He's following in his Dad's footsteps, he’s a drinker.' It fucked me up, it left me depressed, lonely and with nowhere to turn. At one point, I said to my Mum, 'I don’t think I will make it to 30.’ That's how down in the dumps I was."

After it was cancelled, it didn’t take long for Celebrity Love Island to fade into obscurity. But Calum Best still has hold of his fame, even if it is for no reason. Shortly after winning season two with Bianca Gascoigne, he played himself in an episode of Footballers’ Wives and released two self-titled fragrances – the first called ‘Calum’, the second ‘Best’. His MTV show Totally Calum Best saw him attempt to be celibate for 50 days (he failed).

Calum still looks like Jude Law, if the actor was handing students 2-for-1 Jägerbomb vouchers on a Friday night. Now he’s got an Instagram body of his own, complete with a tattoo of the words, “Old Soul Young Heart” in swirling script across his hairless chest. Recently, he told The Sun that he would like to go on the new series of Love Island to find a girlfriend. ITV, please, please take note.

@annielord8