This year’s Love Island villa overlooks a prison housing murderers and serial killers.
The contestants will likely be able to see the jail in the distance across scrubland.
Drakenstein Prison, on the outskirts of Cape Town in South Africa, is famous for being where Nelson Mandela spent the last part of his sentence for campaigning against apartheid.
It has housed notorious murderers including triple axe-killer Henri van Breda, who was found guilty in May 2018 of killing his parents and older brother.
Last week the prison was raided to combat rising levels of crime over Christmas.
Cops seized illegal substances as well as electrical wires, cell phones, chargers and cash.
Love Island returns to our television screens on January 16 for its first winter series since before the pandemic.
TV and radio star Maya Jama, 28, is taking over as presenter from Laura Whitmore, 37, who announced she was stepping down in August.
Jama will also host the usual summer edition in Majorca later in the year.
For the first time, contestants will have to disable their social media accounts during their time on this series.
This is part of an attempt to protect both them and their families from online abuse.
They will also receive guidance and training around “mutually respectful behaviour in relationships” after the last series prompted thousands of complaints to the broadcasting watch-dog Ofcom.
Many of these related to alleged misogynistic and bullying behaviour although they were not upheld.
Islanders will be offered resource links to read before meeting the other contestants to help them “identify negative behaviours in relationships” and “understand the behaviour patterns associated with controlling and coercive behaviour”.
The new measures have been introduced as part of ITV ’s duty of care measures for 2023.
The show faced criticism following the deaths of former contestants Sophie Gradon in 2018 and Mike Thalassitis in 2019, who both committed suicide.
Dr Matthew Gould, a consultant psychologist who is part of the duty of care team, said: “The bold decision to pause islanders’ social media activity during the new series is testament to ITV’s serious intent, especially as this input provides both a benefit to the appeal of the programme and a potential source of mental health problems.”
In 2019, the Jeremy Kyle Show was axed from ITV amid growing scrutiny of the duty of care that reality TV shows have to participants following the death of a contestant.
