Iain Stirling thought 'Love Island' would only last for one season.
Iain Stirling
The 33-year-old comedian provides the voiceover for the ITV2 show, while his wife Laura Whitmore took over presenting duties from the late Caroline Flack, and Iain admitted that he never believed the show would be as successful as it is.
He told inews.co.uk: "We were all going to Magaluf and having an absolute jolly. We thought it had one series, maybe two – it was so expensive to make.
"I just thought I was going to be the voiceover on a reality TV show on a digital television channel. I didn’t think it was going to be this cultural artefact.”
Iain also insisted that he is never mean about the contestants, but admitted that islanders get annoyed with him regardless.
He said: "People think I’m a lot more brutal than I am. If you go through the last six series, I’ve never said I don’t like anyone or been nasty about them. That’s how the show works – if I started talking about how awful everyone was from day one, where do you go from there? I make puns out of their names or their jobs, maybe I’ll say someone doesn’t talk enough – that’s the one the islanders get annoyed about."
And he blames social media - particularly Twitter - for nasty comments about the contestants.
He explained: “Context has been removed from everything. The default assumption is that someone is being vitriolic. You can’t have a lighthearted bit of fun with somebody any more – or at least, I wouldn’t want to, because I would hate for anyone to think I was being genuinely nasty.
“You should know who’s saying that, where they’re saying it from and who they are as a person. If they still stand by what they say, fair play. But if you’re an egg on a website, saying racist stuff – that isn’t free speech.”
Tagged in Laura Whitmore Iain Stirling