Sadly, long gone are the days that the Love Island casting team are going for waiters, builders and ice cream truck drivers (they also did away with farting and people having sex on telly – boring). These days, a summer Love Island cast is made up of mostly influencers, most with ridiculous followings on social media (sorry, but bombshell Remell Mullins ENTERED the Love Island 2025 villa with over 400,000 TikTok followers).
Thank God for taxi driver Ben Holbrough; there's a nice grounded job us regular mortals to relate to. It's a shame he's only managed about 15 minutes of screen time so far, but that's the name of the game.
Saying that, Ben is embracing another modern-day Love Island cliche, one we know Love Island casting has as a massive big tick box on their sheet of requisites, and that is: he's got ties to another reality show. Seriously, Love Island bosses LOVE that one – that's why half of TOWIE has slow-mo walked into at least one villa over the last couple of years.
Anyway, as it turns out, Ben has a pretty famous reality TV star uncle (who is the spit of him, btw – like, how we imagine Ben will look in five years time when he pops up on Celebrity Ex on the Beach).
Said uncle is called Warren Phillips and once upon a time, he starred on ITV2's Survival of the Fittest, presented by Laura Whitmore, who coincidentally co-hosted Love Island for a hot minute before Queen Maya Jama sauntered on in.
ICYMI, Survival of the Fittest was the ultimate 'battle of the sexes' reality TV show; gorgeous singles were flown out to South Africa to take part in various challenges – so think Love Island: All Stars meets Love Island Games (but people were watching). Ben's uncle was part of the line-up in 2018 alongside Dani Dyer, who was forced to pull out when she suffered an injury.
And we're guessing the OG Islander is pretty close to his uncle, as a topless snap of the pair is the only pic pinned to Ben's Instagram grid right now.
After a purely professional stalk of Warren's Instagram, we've decided that he's a muscle daddy version of Luca Bish. Don't be surprised if he ends up being a Casa Amor bombshell at this rate...
Ben entered the Love Island 2025 villa on day one and immediately coupled up with Shakira Khan, before American bombshell Toni Laites iconically stole him from her. Ben and Toni didn't vibe at ALL and after a couple of days, he found his way back to Shakira.
The couple are still together, but both Islanders have somewhat faded into the background amidst all the other villa drama popping off left, right and centre.
