Stirling: Yeah, I love Ted Lasso! I know a lot of guys and girls that write on that, and am really good friends with Brett Goldstein. What did you think of their take on your guys’ show? Especially because Love Island is already sort of a send-up of itself. Paste: So at the beginning of the second season of Ted Lasso, Jamie Tartt finds his way onto Lust Conquers All, which even to someone like me who hadn’t watched Love Island previously, was easily parsable as a Love Island send-up. It’s probably very similar to how Love Island is watched in America, like it’s got that sort of cult-y following with certain people. But I don’t know that actually watch them. A lot of them are like cultural touchstones. Like, I don’t imagine there’ll be many British people who wouldn’t know what The Bachelor is, for example. Stirling: They’ve got like a cult viewing, but I think they’re just sort of culturally there. Or at least, the American approach to the genre. Stirling: The American ones, or dating shows in general? That’s probably the biggest one we’ve got going right now, but there have always been just so many dating shows in the US-how are they perceived on the other side of the ocean? Paste: You had a joke in your special about being pitched to do The Bachelor: Scotland, which put into relief how silly it would be to try to remove that franchise from its original American context. And then about four years later, an episode of that show got sent to ITV, who make Love Island, and they gave me the job off the back of that show, basically. So I started in kids’ TV, and one of the first shows I did was doing voiceover for a show called 12 Again, where celebrities talk about their life when they were twelve, a talking-heads sort of thing. #Love island narrator usa tv#Stirling: I’d done stand-up at university, stand-up comedy, and someone from Children’s BBC saw me and asked me to be a kids’ TV presenter. Paste: So both for me and any other American readers who might be coming to Love Island completely fresh, can you give a quick rundown of how you came to the project? Stirling: Yes, he/him, thank you! And probably comedian, but I’m not particularly precious. Okay, so I’m going to back up a little bit, because I’m trying to get myself in the habit of asking this question at the beginning of interviews: How would you like to be identified? So pronouns, of course, but then also, how do you refer to yourself? As a comedian? A writer? A stand-up? Stirling: Hacker’s also up there! I thought that would have been a reference too far for an American, but clearly not, clearly you’re all over it. Yeah, Taskmaster and Love Island are definitely the two things I’m the most proud of in terms of, like, television stuff. Paste: So I’m coming from what feels like an increasingly rare position: I actually have no background at all with Love Island! But when Peacock reached out to Paste about getting on the phone with you, I was like, well, I loved Iain on Taskmaster, and I loved his recent stand-up special, so yeah, let’s go! Note: The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length. Paste got on the phone with Stirling in advance of Love Island USA’s big streaming relaunch to talk about the process of adapting the series’ signature lexicon and tongue-in-cheek tone for an American audience, adjusting to post-pandemic notoriety, and, of course, Taskmaster. That’s right: Love Island USA is bringing back Scottish comedian Iain Stirling as the series’ quippy, disembodied narrator. More importantly, though, Peacock has picked up on one of the elements that makes the UK original stand out not just to international audiences, but to fans of comedy. For one thing, life on a streaming platform offers a lot more, uh, flexibility (to speak in euphemism) than life on a broadcast network like CBS does. Featuring a contractually obligatory bevy of hot international singles and hosted by Modern Family’s Sarah Hyland, the Peacock version of one of the goofiest shows to take American audiences by pandemic-storm promises to hew much closer to the UK original than the previous broadcast version. Peacock’s Love Island USA-a cheeky, streaming-first revamp of the CBS adaptation that premiered in 2019 and ran for three seasons before handing American rights over to Peacock for a two-season order earlier this year-launches its first season this week.
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