- The 2023 version of big-hit UK TV show Winter Love Island is set in an isolated Franschhoek villa – after apparently moving out of Constantia because it was considered too close to the Cape Flats.
- At Franschhoek, producers are worried about kidnap gangs snatching contestants or staff and holding them for ransom.
- The security measures they have taken, including a reported hotline to the police, are drawing headlines in the UK.
In early 2020, the hit UK TV show Love Island – which locks good-looking contestants in a luxury property and films their romantic doings in return for R500,000 for each of the "winning" couple – set its "winter" season show in Constantia.
UK media enthused about the beauty of the surroundings, the weather, and the general wonders of Cape Town as a holiday destination, for a British audience caught in a northern-hemisphere winter.
But South Africa's high rate of crime, and the steps taken to secure contestants, inevitably featured too.
This January, the Love Island production has returned to South Africa, but not to Cape Town. It is reportedly being filmed in Franschhoek because Cape Town itself was deemed too dangerous thanks to the proximity of the Cape Flats.
But Franschhoek is not being treated as a safe heaven either. UK tabloids say producers fear cast or crew could be kidnapped by gangs who target wealthy visitors. So the production will be ringed by security guards stationed inside the perimeter, with a hotline established to both armed response and the local police, so that "the heavy cavalry would be on their way in seconds" if necessary.
Contestants will also be briefed on what to do in a worst-case scenario.
South African security companies, say the producers, know what they are doing, but the dangers are real.
The show is using the Ludus Magnus Estate, which charges more than R450,000 per day for exclusive use by wedding parties in peak season. The estate says it is 100% off-grid, with its own solar panels and boreholes covering all its needs, and local treatment of sewage water.
In 2022, ITV recorded five million viewers for the opening episode of Love Island. It was not clear whether that was due to, or in spite of, what complainants told a regulator was bullying and misogyny by male cast members.