‘You will never reach your destination if you stop to throw stones at every dog that barks.’

- Winston Churchill

LAST week saw the last in the recent series of Love Island. This phenomenon gripped the country for weeks and scored record high viewing figures.

The formula is simple. Strand a few people – young and beautiful in a sort of Page Three, Essex way, if that isn’t an oxymoron – together in a cardboard villa and see if they pair off. They do.

Last year’s winners declared undying love and walked off into the sunset of media success and photo-shoots. A year later they aren’t together (their ‘love’ lasted as long as their magazine contract) but at least they will have a baby as the ultimate reality television souvenir. It sounds tacky and it is.

The editor of The Lady said she thought it a terrible role model for young people to aspire to and advocated courtship with quiet candlelit suppers and a walk in Windsor Park. But she missed the point that privacy isn’t much valued these days and anything that can’t be recorded and gather ‘likes’ really isn’t the stuff of the modern world.

At the same time that Amber and Kem (‘Kember’, they are called until the publicity dries up) were triumphant, another, very different television aired.

Two young men, princes as it happens, talked about their mother who died 20 years ago. Harry and William presented what was at times a letter to their mother, Diana, as much as about her.

It would be a hard heart that did not go out to them in what is clearly unresolved grief. But grief is like that. It doesn’t matter who died or what the circumstances, grief is never resolved.

People – usually those with no experience of it – tell you to ‘move on’, to get on with it. ‘Remember the good times,’ they say, little knowing that it is the good times that make remembering so difficult. And, however much other people try to help, grief is an intensely private matter.

These young men had no choice as children. They were forced to share their loss with millions of people worldwide who had never met their mother. Their grief was never entirely their own.

It is one of the many paradoxes of grief that while you may feel that you want to talk compulsively about the lost person you also wish to scream that the loss is yours and yours alone.

Now, as adults, they want to remember their mother and celebrate her. William spoke about her terrible treatment at the hands of the press and the dangers of bringing the media in. Yet here he was, talking to the very people who presented him with difficulties.

It is not a story that needs revisiting again. Grief-ridden people hate advice, as I know.

But real life isn’t a television soap opera, it’s a complex conundrum, and meanwhile there is work to be done.

For more from Standard columnist Lesley, visit her site, lesleybrain.com