As long as we have celebrity culture, we will have celebrity tragedy. And whose fault is that?

Just ask why there is so much money to be made and why people are so curious and obsessive about the lives of strangers

There are inevitable consequences for those who are considered fair game, even for those who think they are cynically manipulating the media themselves (Getty)

Like so many commenting on the death of TV presenter Caroline Flack I haven’t much idea about why she died, and it is none of my business. It’s obviously a tragic affair, and her personal circumstances are all too well known. What I think it might be right to say something about is around some of the reaction. I’d like to try and answer the question “Should Love Island now be taken off the air, for good?”

The answer is yes, but not because of what might have happened with Caroline Flack. The show is an organised, cruel grotesquerie, comparable to a Victorian freak show – the worst of exploitative reality TV.

I’ve been unkind about it and about its presenters – but also about its viewers. Yet it is there not so much because ITV is greedy but because the public have an insatiable appetite for this sort of stuff. If they wanted to watch endless documentary series about the planet starring Al Gore, or repeats of Highway, with Harry Secombe, then ITV2 would be full of that stuff. But they don’t. They want to watch glamorous young folk copping off. And then they want to go online and read about their troubled pasts, presents and futures, their embarrassing relatives, old disastrous relationships, party mishaps, scrapes with the authorities, favourite type of vacuum cleaner – the lot. Facebook pages are looted for the most salacious images.