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3 hours ago
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It’s alarming to see just how quickly your sense of superiority can be undone. Just a few weeks ago, British viewers were quietly congratulating themselves on the high drama of The Traitors, a show where a group of inherently nice people are inconvenienced into polite little arguments. It was, we thought, the pinnacle of reality TV.
But now that has been undone by three short words: Montoya, por favor.
If you have been anywhere on the internet recently, you will have almost certainly seen a genuinely jaw-dropping clip from the Spanish reality show La Isla de las Tentaciones in which a contestant, confronted with live footage of his girlfriend having sex with another man, absolutely loses it.
The clip lasts for just over two minutes, but contains more drama than the entire run of Love Island. Shot in the Dominican Republic, contestant José Carlos Montoya stands on a beach and watches as his girlfriend Anita kisses a hunky newcomer on TV. First, he blinks in disbelief. Then, as the newcomer strips to his underwear, Montoya starts to scream at the TV. They cut the lights and Montoya tugs at his swimming trunks in anguish. Night vision footage shows them pulling the covers over their heads, and Montoya falls to his knees screaming. And then Montoya has enough. As lightning streaks across the sky, he sprints the entire length of a beach, screaming and crying, while the show’s presenter begs for him to return. The music swells. We see Anita fully having sex with the other man. And, just as Montoya reaches the villa to confront them, the clip ends. There is drama, there is high drama, and then there is Montoya por favor.
It is breathtaking television, red-zoning with so much adrenalised torment that you can barely comprehend it. And yet this is apparently just another day on La Isla de las Tentaciones; an earlier clip shows Anita kissing another man, which prompts Montoya to a) tear off his shirt in anguish, b) kick the iPad he was watching the footage on and, c) scream into the surf while the host once again pleads, “Montoya, por favor!”
Obviously La Isla de las Tentaciones is the Spanish version of Temptation Island, a 25-year-old format where couples go on holiday to see if they can withstand being seduced by sexy strangers. There have been eight seasons in the US, plus 32 international versions. The UK version aired in 2001 and was such a damp squib that it pretty much died on impact. This might be down to the national temperament. Had British people the sort of personalities that made them scream into the thundering sky, rather than passively squirm with disappointment when faced with a moment of emotional discomfort, then maybe it would still be on television here.
Nevertheless, the point is this: in the year 2025, no human being goes into Temptation Island blind. José Carlos Montoya is 30 years old. Temptation Island has been a thing since he started school, and its whole point is how unethical it is. Even before the very first episode had aired, religious groups were expressing their outrage in the hope that it would get pulled off air.
Both Montoya and Anita must have known that they were going on a show that explicitly encouraged them to cheat on each other. Their expectation going into it must have been that one or both of them was going to cheat. In other words, Anita’s actions weren’t a surprise, and certainly not the sort of surprise that would cause you to run wailing down a beach like an injured horse.
Nevertheless, the reaction to the Montoya por favor clip shows that ethics aren’t really an obstacle to popularity. The clip has already been memed to death, with sporting moments and Twilight clips already dubbed over with Montoya’s pained screams. It will almost certainly make Montoya himself a celebrity for life. Perhaps he can leverage this into actual fame, maybe with a series where he violently overreacts to hundreds of different situations. Or perhaps he’ll just be the guy from the meme for ever. Either way, this is how he’ll be defined until the end of time itself.
As for all the other reality TV shows? This is a line in the sand. The ante has resolutely been upped now, and the old ways simply won’t cut it. We live in a post-Montoya por favor world. Everyone else, with all their normal human reactions, need to get with the programme. Is it too late to end this year’s Apprentice with a shot of Alan Sugar stripping to his pants and throwing himself into a volcano?
