It's easy to be snooty about Love Island, says Rachel Moore. But let's celebrate it as a fascinating social experiment instead.

So a TV show that spied on young people thrown together in holiday villa falling in and out of love shot to cult status, broke ITV2 viewing records and hooked in fans spanning all ages.

Love Island 2017 sparked furious debates and divided the nation arguably more than the last general election.

The antis mocked the candyfloss-brain numpties, A* students in preening, fake tanning and teeth whitening.

The pros defended it as an enlightening entertaining social experiment in a Majorcan villa; challenging contestants to achieve the one thing we universally seek in life: to fall in love. Anthropology meets sexy junk TV.

What's not to like, especially with big bucks at stake? The most convincing couple walked away with £50,000, so sort of a TV audience-arranged marriage and the starting flag for making a mint.

ITV2 reached its biggest-ever audience on Monday when an average 2.43 million saw the longest-standing couple, Kem and Amber – Kamber - crowned the winners.

The series offered the greatest insight into dating 2017-style. Sitting on the sofa next to my 20-year-old hardcore fan son, I learned, with horror, the huge pressures today's young people face in what was once such a simple straightforward dating game.

Insecurities and anxieties were bared as the bar for physical attractiveness was pushed ridiculously high. Everyone looked like a model, drop-dead gorgeous specimens. No one who wasn't a superstar in the 70s, 80s or 90s ever looked like that.

They faced flak for their brainpower, or lack of it. But it's not meant to be Mastermind. Intellectual capacity isn't a qualifier, clearly, and intellectual snobbery is always a cheap shot.

Watching one episode 'to find out what the fuss is about' hooked many middle-aged parents, horrified yet transfixed, to the world our young people are stepping into.

My over-riding thought as I sat with my son was 'what must their parents be thinking?' It couldn't have been their proudest moment.

But it pulled in a fan base of the brainy and the stupid, the professional and the unemployed, the young and the old.

The reason why watching half-witted, bronzed and toned narcissists flirting, coupling and worse was so bewitching? Because it's the close-up nitty-gritty of human behaviour, relationships and reactions that we could never witness otherwise.

People watch Love Island for same reason they watch David Attenborough's programmes or loved Desmond Morris.

Human, like animal, behaviour is compelling viewing. Watching relationships grow and unravel is a gift.

Whoever thought it up is a genius. Reality TV is so successful because it plays on the basic human instinct of voyeurism – which no one likes admit to but most have in spades.

Look at the phenomenon that is the Kardashians

Norfolk's own Caroline Flack is the modern-day Cilla Black. We lapped up Blind Date in the 80s. Why be so snooty about Love Island? It's the extended-play version in a Majorcan villa.

Had it been presented as a documentary, Attenborough-style, its credibility would never have been questioned. So many people's guilty secret would have been lauded as great social observation.

These are self-obsessed bronzed, attention-seeking wannabe stars driven by the sniff of instant fame and the blink-and- you'll-miss-it flurry of cash instead of animals on the plain. Same principle, same fascination.

It's time to get off our high horse and be honest about reality TV.

Love Island is the Life of Mammals or Frozen Planet, a fascinating close-up on human nature and the reality of how it all works.