Worst Take of the Week: 'Love Island' Vs Brexit

Welcome to Angus Take House – a weekly column in which I will be pitting two of the wildest takes the world's great thinkers have rustled up against each other. This is your one-stop shop for the meatiest verdicts and saltiest angles on the world's happenings. Go and grab a napkin – these juicy hot takes are fresh from the griddle.

TAKE #1:

What's the story? Apparently more people applied for Love Island than Oxford and Cambridge this year.
Reasonable Take: Your point being?
High Brow Mein: …apparently more people applied for Love Island than Oxford and Cambridge this year.

Fucking hell, I've read this genuinely rotten take more times this week than I've had texts from my girlfriend (of which there have been at least four!!!). I'm not about to embark on some defence of Love Island as "actually important discourse" partly because I don't watch it, but mostly because you don't need to defend Love Island to see what a load of shite this is.

The first issue here is simply the volume of people who had just heard and had to share this "so depressing you have to laugh" news, this devastating bellwether for our times. Every news outlet imaginable, every radio talk-show phone-in regular, every vague television personality, every middle-of-the-road talking head, all of them clucking endlessly into the void with smug grins on their faces. "Apparently… more people… applied to Love Island… than Oxford or Cambridge… this year," over and over again until the lights go out on the world. What's become of the intellectual world I once cherished so dearly!

Worse, though, is that people actually think this is in some way a meaningful statistic. Love Island obviously has more applicants because it is a TV show anyone can enter, as opposed to a university which accepts applications from the top academic tier of one school year. You don't go to Oxford's website, fill in a form and film a little tape of yourself talking about why you think you’d get on really well with the Russian language department in the hope of winning £50k and a solid 2:1 at the end of it. More people buy lottery tickets and play HQ Trivia every lunchtime than applied to Oxford, too. So really, imagine reading this news and sincerely tweeting the words "shocking state of affairs".

Plenty of people have also pointed out that, in fact, Love Island has achieved a better rate of accepting black applicants in one season than many Oxford colleges have managed in six years. Which points to the tragic self-own at the crux of this take. Perhaps these numbers owe as much to the historically elitist climate set by these institutions as they do the popularity of an innocuous reality show! Maybe! But no, you’re probably right. Best just to quote tweet it with the verdict "sums up this country". Place has gone to the dogs!

The most depressing things is that a quick Twitter search will tell you that the exact same furore kicked off over the exact same statistic last year, meaning we are probably cursed to hear this same smarmy soundbite every summer for as long as Love Island is on telly. Which is probably going to be for a long time, considering how popular it is. Don’t know if you’ve heard, but apparently more people applied for Love Island than Oxford and Cambridge this year!

TAKE #2:

What’s the story? This week, Brexit secretary David Davis threatened to resign over Theresa May’s proposed handling of the Irish Border in the Brexit negotiations.
Reasonable Take: Go on m8, resign!
Pork Balls: David Davis is hard as fuck.

This is the second time Nadine Dorries has appeared in this column in the space of three weeks, which puts her on a run of hot takes so terrible and inflammatory she'll probably be a front-runner to replace Theresa May within a couple of months. She's typical of that "eccentric" model of Tory: the sort that says really egregious stuff but somehow gets patted on the back and called a legend because they intersperse every bad thing with something "bonkers". Anyway, look at this bonkers thing she said.

Despite having been apparently talked down from the edge, David Davis has had a resignation letter loaded up in his Yahoo outbox all week, his mouse hovering over the send button, over his concerns that Theresa May's proposed solution to the Irish border could leave the door open for half-baked EU membership for the rest of the UK. It’s a threat that has sent most Conservative MPs and commentators into convulsions, their understandable fear being that any resignation or sackings – whether Davis, or Boris Johnson, who was making the news this morning – could be the straw to break the camel's stick-thin, shuddering spine.

Everyone except Dorries, who took the opportunity to send an unequivocal message to Theresa May as to what will happen to her if she messes with Davis. He's SAS-trained. He knows how to survive. He knows how to take people out. That’s right. David Davis is going to murder the Prime Minister if he doesn’t get a border deal he’s happy with.

Sadly, this probably gave Davis himself a boner. Everything about his faux-suave demeanour screams "I wish I was a spy." He is the only man in the country who actually buys that James Bond aftershave. According to an interview he gave a few years ago, he keeps a photo of himself jumping out of a helicopter in his office and even uses the word "spooks" in passing conversation. That said, many have pointed out that Davis was actually only in the territorial SAS (on weekends). All a bit Ross Kemp, isn't it.

PRIME CUT: Apparently more people applied for Love Island than Oxford and Cambridge this year. Shocking.

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