Love Island scores for ITV, but is it repeatable?

The show has drawn an audience in to ITV 2 that has been deserting traditional TV

Love Island: A winner for ITV (ITV/Rex)

What if Love Island is a “non-recurring phenomenon”?

In his book “Adventures in the Screen Trade” William Goldman coined the phrase to describe the way Hollywood execs in the 1990s treated films that challenged the prevailing wisdom for what you needed to make a hit (and a profit) but which the studios were too conservative to try to repeat.

He used the example of the First Wives Club, which proved there was a market for a film with female leads aged over 30. Film bosses with imagination have since tried it again (albeit too rarely) and found success. So First Wives wasn't really a non recurring phenomenon after all.

ITV will have no similar hesitation about green lighting Love Island lookalikes. But what if that show is a genuine one off?

Love Island has done something unusual. It has drawn an army of viewers to a second tier channel (ITV 2), and in particular younger viewers (aged 20-34), who have been abandoning traditional tele.

But even with the contribution it, and other hit shows made, the ad revenue produced by what the company likes to describe as the "ITV family” (ugh) limped in at £769m, down 8 per cent. That is the steepest slide in nearly a decade. June was particularly awful, with an 18 per cent slump, although that was in no small part because last year’s numbers were fattened by the Euro 2016 football championships.

Further declines are expected.

Uncertainty, exacerbated by the Government’s staggeringly incompetent handling of Brexit, is clearly playing a role in advertisers’ reluctance to spend.

But it isn’t just that. The market is changing.

ITV chairman Sir Peter Bazalgette has argued that viewers will still tune into “good content”.

Whether that description applies to Love Island is debatable. Personally I’d rather stick a rusty spike into my leg than watch it, but I might be out of step here. My Twitter feed demonstrates that Sir Peter isn’t alone among people with the odd grey hair or three to admit to a fondness for it.

The question that ought to be keeping him up at night is whether ITV, under new CEO Carolyn McCall, can prove me wrong by repeating the Love Island trick repeatedly. Or whether she can replace a declining revenue stream quickly enough through diversification to keep the City sweet. Pulling off both? That would be manna from heaven.

ITV Studios did well again, although it sells a lot of content to ITV. Overall external revenues declined by 3 per cent, while profits fell by 10 per cent. Even though some advertisers have sought out ITV as a safe haven after it emerged that some online advertising on YouTube had contributed to funding extremist content, the outlook is far from cheerful. Ms McCall will have a lot on her plate when she walks through the door.

Mr Bazalgette has played down the threat from the likes of Netflix, likening it to a digital channel in terms of its overall audience share.

Thing is, it, and other streaming or on demand services, even the aforementioned YouTube, are all available to people like me if we want to watch other things on those occassions when the rest of the family indulges in communal viewing of, say, Britain’s Got Talent (one of the increasingly rare shows now capable of deliveirng a mass audience). It isn't only Milennials who are starting to shun trad tele.

The TV market is set to continue to change, and in ways that are hard to predict. Who'd heard of Netflix five years ago?

Even if Love Island's success can be repeated, it might not be enough.