Love Island: From villa to screen

It’s the biggest show of the summer in the UK, and the format has sold all over the world to countries including Germany, Australia and Finland.

The dramatic entanglements of Love Island’s contestants are nothing if not minutely documented. But less well known is how every kiss, mugging off and argument is captured, analysed, clipped and aired for almost instant public consumption.

The fourth season of the hit ITV2 show, produced by ITV Studios, regularly pulls in around three million viewers keen to follow every move of the islanders holidaying in a villa on the east coast of Mallorca.

The matchmaking show is stripped weekdays into hour-long episodes for eight weeks until the end of July and uses a total of 73 cameras, four more than the 2017 season.

The post production demands and fly-away kit has grown too, which - given the confines of the space in and around the villa - forced ITV to locate its production hub, post and uplink facilities 5km away.

“This is the biggest challenge for this series,” explains ITV Studios’ Technical Manager Steve Kruger, who works on the show. “The size of the production has grown in tandem with the show’s popularity so while we have a gallery up at the villa, we are sending links back to the Edit Village in a second site.”

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The distance between the villa and the Edit Village (3.2km by line of sight) also crossed many different landowners and multiple roads ruling out the conventional use of fibre. Instead the connection is made by…