David Farnor | On 21, Jul 2018

BBC Three is taking on Love Island this summer with a new reality series that promises friendship break-ups and make-ups abroad, unfolding in real time.

The social-first series heads to Spain to follow 13 young holiday-makers comprised of different friendship groups from across the UK, as they meet each other for the first time and head abroad for an epic journey. Through the prism of the trip, One Hot Summer will provide a window into a new group of friends from different walks of life as they break free from their normal lives and leave behind the daily pressures they face for an excursion abroad.

Over the period of a month, the group will travel together to Barcelona, Marbella and Seville to discover the best of what the country has on offer. Instead of Love Island’s old-school nightly broadcast on ITV 2, though, BBC Three will be using social media to provide daily updates, alongside bespoke content for the series. The best of the week’s events will be available in a weekly compilation episode available on BBC iPlayer every Sunday. Then, when the travellers go to Ibiza, BBC Three will be joining forces with BBC Radio 1, so they can experience BBC Radio 1 in Ibiza.

Damian Kavanagh, Controller, BBC Three, says: “BBC Three craves experimentation and innovation and we’re ripping up the rule book and approaching this series in a very different way to a traditional TV show. Alongside the weekly episodes that we’ll show on BBC iPlayer, we’re harnessing social like never before and utilising the BBC Three social ecosystem as a way for the audience to get closer to what is happening in real-time as stories unfold. It promises to be a visceral, exciting trip that follows young people with different outlooks on life looking to learn something new about themselves, living in the moment and coming of age abroad.”

On the trip are the ‘London Swagger’ boys, consisting of Chris, Shaq and Reenel, business partners and friends from South London going on their first holiday together; the ‘Straight Out of Swansea’ girls, Yaz and Sav, who want to break free from their bubble; ‘Small Town DJs’ Sam and Luke, who want to become big time DJs; ‘The Performers’, Rashida, Aimée and Izzy, who met at a Performing Arts school this year who will spend the summer together to get to know each other better; ‘The Party Animals’ Lewis and Megan, who have been best friends for 10 years, and want to get away and escape from their small home town; and ‘The Young Farmer’, Aidan, whose mates are all coupled up and who wants to break out of the countryside where he sells lawnmowers for a living and meet new people.

The audience can follow what the group are getting up to via a live page on bbc.co.uk/onehotsummer , which will be kept updated daily with videos and news from the series. Bespoke “full scenes” created for each BBC Three social platform will be released in their entirety at the time they were happening in real life alongside on the ground social content of activities for Instagram Stories or Facebook Live.

Additionally, there will be an accompanying YouTube series for BBC Three called About Last Night that dissects events from the day before and a weekly compilation programme available on BBC Three’s iPlayer page every Sunday from 22nd July until 26th August.

With its innovative approach and social media savvy, and a release timed to coincide with annual Love Island fatigue setting in, could BBC Three steal ITV 2’s summer crown?

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