It’s a year since Laura Whitmore quit Love Island, and her new project couldn’t be further from that show’s mix of blinding tans and inane banter. In Laura Whitmore Investigates, a three-part series on the ITVX streaming platform that is due to air on ITV1 next month, the Bray, Co Wicklow, presenter explores a range of worrying social phenomena that pose a clear and present danger to women.
It’s reportage with a personal touch. “The last couple of years have been the scariest time to be a woman,” Whitmore says at the beginning of the first instalment. “I, myself, have never been more afraid of walking home alone.”
The dangers she addresses in these frank and sometimes shocking documentaries are rough sex, incel culture and stalking.
It makes for uncomfortable and occasionally hair-raising viewing. “It feels wrong looking directly at it,” gasps Whitmore, from a London pornography studio specialising in sadomasochism. “I can’t believe I stood there and watched that.”
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We had sex maybe once a month. The constant rejection was soul-crushing, it felt like my ex didn’t even like me
The incel episode is the one where she feels at highest personal risk. She has travelled to the United States to meet a high-profile figure in the incel world who has built up a huge following with hateful screeds about women needing to get back into the kitchen.
“Am I going to make myself a target?” she wonders, noting that more than 100 people have been injured or murdered in incel-related attacks across the past decade.
In the flesh, the incel is a pathetic figure who has projected his crippling self-hate on to women. Driving away after their encounter, Whitmore worries about his state of mind.
The most personal episode is part three, where the subject is stalking. “I was the victim of a stalking incident: I was receiving threatening letters,” Whitmore recounts. “The perpetrator set up some fake online accounts. This was years ago. I didn’t really know it was stalking. I just knew it was scary.”
She went to the police in London, and they were, by her own account, entirely useless. They didn’t know what an IP address was and did not understand that the image the stalker was using on social media was not his own. “I thought, do you know what – I can’t be arsed with this,” she recalls.
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The authorities take stalking more seriously nowadays, though it is obviously still traumatic for those on the receiving end. Whitmore meets BBC South weather presenter Alexis Green, who was bombarded with explicit messages from a stalker who was eventually jailed. But he will be out of prison soon, and she is terrified. “If I see him in the street, I’m going to run,” Green says. “I’m not hanging around.”
Stalkers come in every shape and size. Whitmore interviews a woman who finally discovered the person sending her explicit messages was her husband – a revelation that confirmed her suspicion that she needed a divorce without delay.
Laura Whitmore Investigates adopts the voguish style of the presenter conducting interviews and then sharing their personal perspective to the camera. It’s a change from the tradition of the detached narrator, and Whitmore, having herself dealt with a stalker, is a compelling guide. She mixes empathy and journalistic verve and confirms that there is life after Love Island.
