My go to guilty, or guilt-less, pleasure is ‘Love Island’. The dramatic entrances, kisses, challenges (don’t get me stated on the heart rate challenge) and a sprinkling of “I’ve got a text”, makes for perfect viewing when combined with Ian Stirling’s brilliant one line-ers. However, we are now in the interim period between the winter and summer seasons, where ITVX lacks our daily hit of “Can I pull you for a chat?”.
Though, I enjoy watching ‘The Apprentice’ on Facetime with my boyfriend, whilst we inevitably say, that we could, in fact, do better marketing than any of the contestants, the once-weekly viewing doesn’t hit the same as shows like ‘Love Island’ and ‘I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here’. Feeling at a loss, my housemate and I took a deep dive into ITVX’s greatest, and stumbled across the icon herself, Olivia Attwood – this is when we decided to watch ‘Olivia Attwood’s Getting Filthy Rich’. Not only does the show provide entertainment and education around sex, from cliches to kinks, the show aims to diminish stigma around sex workers and porn, showing the lows, the highs, and everything in between.
That’s the thing about guilty pleasures, they don’t have to be good, but as long as they make you laugh, and pull people closer together, I believe they have ultimately done their job.
After binge-watching the series in a week, we delved into Attwood’s ‘Bad Boyfriends’. The show takes on problematic relationships, aiming to reform former ‘bad’ boyfriends, turning them into marriage material. The show, for me, is peak guilty pleasure television, and is so bad, that it’s good. We got so obsessed, that we finished it in less than a week.
Now we have exhausted ITVX’s offerings and have had to move our escapades to another platform, All4, where we found ‘Married and First Sight Australia’, as our evening entertainment, where the Australian accents make everything funny. That’s the thing about guilty pleasures, they don’t have to be good, but as long as they make you laugh, and pull people closer together, I believe they have ultimately done their job.
