Reality TV is “a combination of reality and produced elements” say ITV after criticism of the veracity of its Love Island reality show.

ITV have a history of deceiving viewers. The company’s franchise holder, Carlton, was fined £2 million in 1996 by the Independent Television Commission (ITC) for 16 deceptions in its faked drug “documentary” The Connection.

And the ITV network picked up a record total fine of £5,675,000 in 2005 for a string of serious breaches of Ofcom’s Broadcasting code, which included ignoring paid for telephone votes from viewers for awards to celebrities when they failed to nominate the celebrity the ITV producers wanted to win, selecting competition finalists before the lines were closed, selecting finalists on the basis of their deemed suitability to be on television rather than at random and selecting finalists on the basis of where they lived rather than at random. The size of this fine would have been very much larger had not ITV pledged £7.8 million for viewer compensation and to charity.

ITV programmes reportedly guilty of fakery over the years include Love Island, the Jeremy Kyle Show, the Trisha chat show, Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway, I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, Britain’s Got Talent, The X Factor and courtroom show Judge Rinder.