The air turned positively blue during the most recent episode of ‘The Island With Bear Grylls’.
Series two of the reality show, which sees 16 strangers dropped into an island in the Pacific ocean, left to fight it out for survival, kicked off on Monday (28 March) night, but it wasn’t the high drama of the show that left viewers talking, but the bad language.
Yes, the contestants’ swearing left some viewers reeling, with a staggering 95 swear words squeezed into the 45-minute episode, including 67 variants of “fuck” and one eyebrow-raising C-bomb.
Many complained that Channel 4 should have done more to censor the gros mots:
However, others have stuck up for the contestants, insisting that their swearing is fine, given the extreme circumstances they found themselves in:
The Sun have even reported that the show has broken the UK record for most swearing in a single episode, prompting three complaints to Ofcom so far.
‘The Island’ is still a long way off the current world record-holder, though, which is held by the MTV comedy ‘Strutter’, boasting that it crammed 201 obscenities into its debut episode, which aired in 2006.
Channel 4 issued a statement following the controversy, which read: “The show was preceded by a warning of strong language throughout and it was appropriately scheduled after the watershed.”
Chef Gordon Ramsay previously faced a similar backlash, when an hour-long episode of ‘Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares’ saw him averaging at one swear word every 20 seconds, while the infamous BBC broadcast of ‘Jerry Springer: The Opera’ dropped 174 expletives over the course of two hours.
