Nothing to love about TV island

The food bill’s suddenly gone through the roof, and that can only mean one thing - both our teenage daughters are home for the summer.
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When it’s just me, the boss, the dog and the two cats, the weekly shopping bill is about £40. And for that we eat like royalty. We’ve ploughed our way through the Hairy Bikers’ Great Curries, a slow cooker recipe book and we’re about one fifth of the way through Pinch Of Nom.

In the past fortnight we’ve had a chicken korma and a balti, spinach and ricotta cannelloni, lasagne and nobody has moaned once. Now the teenage food critics are back in town, it’s a different story. Daughter #1’s overnight conversion to vegetarianism and daughter #2’s aversion to anything that’s not coated in breadcrumbs and bakes in the oven for 20 minutes at 200C means mealtimes are back to being the culinary minefield they once were.

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If you were to draw a Venn diagram of what everyone in our family will stomach for dinner, it would have a dwindling intersection containing Domino’s pizza, cannelloni and maybe shepherds pie. At a push.

But it’s not just the food bill that’s gone haywire, the TV’s turned to s*** too. Recently we’ve gorged on masterpieces like Fleabag and Killing Eve. Now the girls are back home, the telly is commandeered at 9pm every night for Love Island, which is like Big Brother but worse. I watched about 30 seconds of it once, and maybe it’s a generational thing, but the real life Action Men strutting around like peacocks and the plastic Barbies tottering around wearing bikinis made out of dental floss are like the people you meet around the pool on the first day of your holiday and then spend the next fortnight trying to avoid.

The greatest scam ever would be if the producers locked these fame-hungry nimrods in a compound for the summer to pose, pout and preen - and then, after a few months, when they’re finally sick of the sight of each other, tell them the cameras are all fake, the show doesn’t exist and nobody knows who they are. And then zoom on their heartbroken little faces. Now that’s an episode of Love Island I’d watch.