JENNY JOHNSTON asks Kai and Sanam how DID the teacher and social worker end up winning Love Island?

Theirs is, as one fan pointed out, the love story we didn’t know we needed.

Kai Fagan and Sanam Harrinanan flew back from South Africa this week as the newly crowned, and most unlikely, winners of Love Island.

Autograph and selfie hunters (mostly from the TikTok generation) were clamoring to meet the brilliant young couple with perfect teeth at the airport. The flashes went off.

I am told that one of their first tasks, before they became involved in a media frenzy of television appearances and influencer meetings, was to go shopping. Of course it was. Gucci? Prada?

They laugh. “Kill them!” Kai says. And we only went because we had run out of clean clothes. We have no plans to change.

To say that Kai and Sanam, both 24, are not your typical Love Island winners is putting it mildly. They’re not even your typical contestants. In this, their first interview, they tell me they were both surprised to even be selected for the show.

“We’re pretty boring, really,” Kai says, “we never get into all the things you think people on Love Island have to do: the fighting and the controversy.” So we never expected to win. We were surprised when people seemed to like us.’

Does the coronation of Kai and Sanam mean a major change in the direction of shows like Love Island or (whisper) even the death knell for that section of the TV industry?

There is no bling about them at all. Kai worked as a physical education and science teacher at a comprehensive complex in Greater Manchester and played semi-professional rugby for Burnage before applying. Sanam was a social worker in Bedford. They have five degrees between them. They are categorically not airheads.

Our conversation is unusual. I’ve interviewed Love Island stars before and frankly it can be torture because they tend to lack life experience and live in a social media bubble.

These two don’t. They’re in that sweet spot where they have experience doing tough jobs, but they didn’t do them long enough to get tired. They seem to genuinely want to change the world (and not in a beauty contestant way).

They also share, even now, a sense of bewilderment about what goes on on shows like Love Island.

“During the final, all these people would come to do our hair or touch up our makeup,” says Kai. ‘That is not me! I’m just a little boy from Sale. He was thinking, ‘You don’t really need to do this, you know?’

We spend much of this interview talking about their jobs and how they have impacted their lives (short answer: massively).

Kai’s school had a high percentage of children from challenging backgrounds, including refugees.

“Even kids with PTSD who had fled war zones,” he says. ‘When the war started in the Ukraine, we had children from there. I’ve been in situations where it’s hard to be sure of the age of the children, because there was no paperwork.’

Buzz when he talks about ‘reaching out’ to those kids. “I started teaching thinking it was all about the subjects, then I realized that where I thought I could make the biggest difference was actually in the extracurricular stuff.

‘Some of my former colleagues have been in touch to say ‘well done Kai’. The students too, but for them it’s still ‘Mr. Fagan’.

Sanam’s mastery was in the media perceptions of social workers. “I was worried about going to Love Island because of it,” she says. ‘Would people realize that we can be nice?’

His professional experience involved contact with often troubled children after they were placed up for adoption.

‘I loved. To build that relationship, to see them go from kids not wanting to talk to me at all, to having them talk, was amazing. His adoptive parents too. It was part of my job to support the development of those relationships.’

So why, why, why would they take such valuable jobs to participate in a reality show that many consider empty?

“The people I ultimately want to work with, the kids, see it,” says Kai. “You can have any view you want of shows like Love Island, but trust me, and I’ve seen it in classrooms, kids watch it, and the people on Love Island are their role models.

“One of the common conversations I would have with these kids, who are all on TikTok and social media, is who is influencing them.”

Sanam nods. Like Kai, she delivered the notice of her to participate in the show, but only because there was no other choice.

‘But I will meet with my former manager on Thursday to discuss how I can continue to help them. And this will give me a platform that I just wouldn’t have had before.’

Wait, are they saying that they thought they could have more influence on the younger generation as reality TV stars than as teachers and social workers? They don’t go that far: “I believe in the power of education,” says Kai, but the hint is there.

Kai asks directly, ‘Would you be talking to us if we were a teacher or a social worker?’

Whatever it is, Kai hopes their love story will be a force for good. ‘Many of the children I have taught come from broken homes, and I know the same thing happened with Sanam. Many of them will never see a positive relationship. If they can look at us and say ‘yes, it’s doable’, then that’s a positive thing.’

Drawing inspiration from his own role models, Kai adds: “Marcus [Rashford] has been an inspiration ever since he burst onto the scene, everything he’s done to [alleviate] child poverty through free school meal schemes is unbelievable.

“I can see how useful and impactful his work has been, and honestly, he’s an inspiration to me and everyone else in the country.”

Maybe we need to think again about what ‘influencer’ really means, because these two say they’re going to use their £50,000 prize not to buy design equipment, but to invest in companies that help underprivileged children.

However, what about when they get offers to model or to launch fashion brands, or false eyelash ranges (which is de rigueur for Love Island success stories). They do not say that they will reject this.

“Obviously, if there’s something we’d use anyway, or a product we feel positive about, then yes, but we’re going to be careful about it. We will not sell ourselves. We will not become what we are not.

Which brings me to the heart of the matter: can we really believe that these two strangers met, stepped out in front of over three million viewers, and truly fell in love?

“We’re in love,” Kai says. Sanam actually said it first, publicly on the show, but she laughs that she didn’t mean to. we had said [to each other] that we were going to keep everything private, but it just slipped out on us,” he says.

Sanam says that Kai immediately blew her mind; and vice versa. “We just had these proper conversations,” Kai says. ‘We had similar backgrounds, jobs, values ​​and morals. I just thought she was amazing..’

As is the custom on Love Island, before long they were sharing a bed. Which is not even remotely normal. They both laugh.

“Yes, but you do things backwards on Love Island. We haven’t even been on a proper date yet, in the real world, but we’ve had all this intense pillow talk, because you have.

People will be skeptical, obviously. The ‘kerching’ factor is always higher when couples head out on Love Island, because, frankly, a happy couple sells. However, these two seem really in love.

“And my mother loves him,” says Sanam. ‘She had never said nice things about any of my previous boyfriends. Of course, she never wanted to introduce them to them.

Are they still, um, sharing a bed? Both seem shy, but they confess that they are. “When you start sharing a bed with someone, you don’t want to share a bed with that person,” says Sanam. Can we talk about sex then? They prefer not to. Have we found a couple from Love Island who is also quite reserved?

“Obviously, there are tasks on Love Island…like with the chocolate sauce,” Kai says, referring to the night Sanam licked the chocolate sauce off his chest. He looks a little mortified.

“But we said from the beginning that we wanted to keep that side private, because it’s private.”

Are you thinking of getting married? A family? I expect them to tell me to mind my own business, but they nod enthusiastically.

“We both live with our parents and in different parts of the country,” Sanam says, referring to the fact that Kai lives with his mother in Greater Manchester, while she lives with hers in Bedford.

“But we’ve looked at the map to see where we could live together, exactly between the two of us.”

How many children are we talking about then? “I think two,” says Sanam. Kai nods.

Let’s watch this space, and it will be interesting to see how Kai and Sanam’s victory impacts the future of Love Island. There were rumors on social networks about how this series was less explosive and therefore less exciting. Can you be too boring?

Not according to these two. “I guess people voted for us because we were real,” Kai says. We plan to continue like this.