The Winter 'Love Island' Power Ranking: Week One

Every minute that passes brings us a little closer to death. This isn’t really a point about how it’s Love Island yet again and time has continued its inexorable march or anything like that – this season, after all, was brought forward by five months in order to satisfy our nation’s terrible thirst for the format. You only get one life, so you might as well fill it with whatever crap you like best, including hot people crying on each other in swimwear.

While I doubt you're actually happy about Love Island's return, you’ve probably decided to wholeheartedly embrace brain worms and watch the new winter series. Mostly because it’s January, you spaffed all your wages when you got paid early before Christmas, and you’re wondering if it’s possible to get the benefits of Vitamin D if you look at the sun on telly.

And if you’re going to do something, then you should do it properly. As such: please be upstanding for the first Love Island Power Ranking of 2020. It is – if not quite good – then at least OK, to be back.

Sorry, this is a really unfortunate picture but it was too funny not to include. Let me balance it out with a nicer one:

Okay, so, Sophie – sister of This Morning’s Rochelle Humes, medical PA, and, it would seem, new queen of the nation’s heart. It’s early days but we know the equation she represents well:

It is, as the wretchéd meerkat sayeth, “simples.”

I am inclined to see the tiff Sophie had with Callum at the end of Sunday night’s episode as indicative of the fact that they’ll probably be together throughout the whole thing, rather than as bad news (they already feel like a powerful and unstoppable force of "getting a new build and furnishing it entirely in crushed velvet.") Based on this, if she is not in the final*, I will be stunned. Also congratulations to her for being the best dressed so far because if Molly Mae – she of the 3 million on Instagram, the PLT deal, the Tatti Lashes deal, the Beauty Works deal, the self-tanner line – taught us anything, it’s that this shit counts.

*I previously noted that Sophie has a bit of the Amy Hart “cuppa and a chat x” aura about her, so I’d like to provide myself a get-out clause here: if she does end up leaving because Callum’s head is turned by a prodigiously horny Irishwoman, I reserve the right to say I was right about that.

If this pair have any sense, they will cleave onto each other until the end and ride all the way home to an easy win (it’s obvious who the Power Players (PPs) of the season are already – Mike, Leanne, Shaughna, Sophie, and potentially Paige – and as the only two PPs in a couple, Mike and Leanne really may already have it sewn up), but from the way Mike was looking at the twins, I am not sure he can be credited with this level of foresight. Do you want £50,000 or what mate.

While I am still howling out of the window for an hour per day over the fact that Maya Jama wasn’t selected to host in Caroline Flack’s absence, I did like Laura Whitmore’s sleeves, on a show where sleeves are too often in absentia. In terms of Whitmore’s vibe as a presenter (the only real big change for the winter season, along with the new South Africa location), I am so far getting "older cousin who really has her life sorted out, is beloved by the family and looks at you with a pitiful expression while asking if you’ve got a boyfriend yet," by which I mean it all felt a bit serious??? But very willing to give her time to settle in based on the sleeves.

A stroke of genius.

Two out of five men entered the villa in a co-ord this season. I do not need to tell you that this is almost half. Unfortunately for co-ord sales, this show airs in the UK where it’s currently about two degrees (*strokes chin* interestingly, this might have a bit of an effect on Love Island’s selling power in general. The instant gratification that makes up so much of fast fashion’s USP probably won’t be as appealing when it’s the third week of January and you have no need for a string bikini.)

I do always feel a bit sorry for the woman who enters the show at the end of episode one because while she has all the Inter-Villa Power (in that she can couple up with whichever man she wants), she has absolutely no Outside Villa Power – which is the actually important thing – because having to split up a couple, even one that is a day old, fundamentally makes you look bad to the British public. This is the position that Jess and Eve, The Twins, find themselves in, and despite confidently asserting that they “never fight over boys :)” the VT for tonight’s episode did very much seem to depict them… fighting over boys. Might it have been a mistake to go on the UK’s most notorious dating show with your literal twin sister Y/N?

Despite uttering the best line of the first episode (“Definitely see myself in Downing Street one day… but I thought maybe Love Island first.”) Shaughna has unfortunately had a problem and it is that her head has fallen off, into the lap of a man named Callum who might well bin her for a twin. For the sake of her potential summer capsule collection of sarongs, I hope I am simply being misled by the edit of the trailer for tonight.

Bad luck getting picked by someone you don’t fancy, even worse luck to vaguely come around to the idea of that person, only for them to then pull someone else for a chat in the first “pulling for a chat” of the season.

Do you know what I mean though? They look like they’re at Olan Mills having their pictures done for the living room.

Hot on the heels of the revelation that this man may or may not get his kicks hunting endangered animals, Ollie has been allowed to go on the programme anyway (never mind that the strained ecological climate currently sees dozens of species going extinct every day, it’s just a laugh really hehe x) in order to terrorise women via the medium of telling them that they have “really cool eyes.” Are you there, God? It’s me, Lauren.

@hiyalauren