The 'Love Island' Week That Was

The concept of this column is always the same: the week that was on Love Island, recapped and sprinkled with memes. In a way, this is a sort of structural metaphor, a retelling of the sheer concept of Love Island itself: the same show with different faces, the same roles being played just by different gym lads and bikini girls in different PrettyLittleThing summer-season coats and dresses, the same dates, over and over and over again, blazing to death in the Spanish sun.

Do you see now that fit people are only capable of saying the same three things on dates – "What's your type then?"; "How old are you?" "How old am I? Guess."; "Your eyes are amazing" – because they have never had to try before, because they have never had to develop genuine patter? Do you not see that this show is the same words, the same sexual configurations, the same middle-of-the-season house split, year after year after year? Do you not know that this column will simply always be the same? Do you care? Of course you don’t. You do not care. Anyway—

As a man who does not look like Anton – a preternaturally groomed Scottish Hercules with a body made of finely honed beef – it is very enjoyable to me to watch a man who does look like Anton have something close to a mental breakdown as he realises that his superpower – Looking Like Anton – does not work here, in the villa, where everyone Looks Like Anton Or Better, and so Looking Like Anton is no longer enough.

It's fascinating to watch a man’s ego be made and unmade in slow-motion, exploded apart as each successive 40K-follower bikini model crawls into the villa on wedges, looks him up and then down, takes him for exactly one date and decides she no longer wants to get to know him. Anton, bronzed and perfect in the lap of the pool, arms folded hugely across his chest, suddenly feeling that pang of humanity that runs through me, through you, through all your friends and family: you are not the fittest person in the room. You are not that interesting. You are fundamentally difficult to love. Feels good, doesn't it, mate! Welcome to my world!

A rare but interesting subplot to this year's game is the supra-Machiavellian power struggle within the ranks of The Girls, a united force of women who are astoundingly accepting of new friends (see: the bizarre ease in which power-shagger Maura entered the fray; Arabella’s place on the beanbags is already assured) but bizarrely reluctant to support the old, so for example we had that whole tedious thing where Amy – so ensconced in domestic life with Curtis already that I feel their first proper post-villa date will be "doing a big shop at a large Essex Tesco" – tried to oust Lucie for being more of a boy's-girl, and Elma tried to shag Tom from underneath Maura ("The bird has literally lost her shit in here" – Elma, 2019, an under-rated islander, I miss you every day), and everyone seems determined to give bad advice to Yewande.

One vital sturdy breeze block on which the fragile peace within the girls has been built – Anna – has now been yanked out of the keystone position in the bridge because she’s too busy snogging Jordan with half a blanket over her arse, which means the structure of the girls is now in danger: next week we are basically due an absolutely massive – and I mean massive – inter-Girl pagga. Look out for it.

Always one, isn't there. Yewande – "Ooh! I tink about cancer!" – is a beautiful force for good both in the world and in the villa, but fucking hell she doesn’t know how this game is played, does she? It happens every year – Camilla Thurlow an obvious example from history; Pink Alex, baffled by the rules of shagging, glowing like a lobster beneath the red rays of the sun – but you really do wonder how one of two things happens: how on earth you go through life being that annoyingly attractive but not knowing how to talk to people even at all; how on earth you entered the process of being chosen for this show in the first place.

Any idiot can flirt like shit. If I wanted to see that I could just strap a GoPro to myself on any given night out and review the footage in the morning. I don’t want to see sexy people doing it.

Don't know if you remember Joe – Joe? Little Joe? Sandwich shagger? Put his tongue in his cheek every time Lucie did literally anything outside of the confines of an apparently strict and iron-clad list of rules he had stored in his head? The floppy hair lad? Joe? – but he was voted out this week, and what Lucie was meant to do was sob on a daybed for a day, Really Think About Joe and decide to leave during the blazing white light of the day, before we get a montage shot of her hugging all of The Girls and tearfully waving goodbye to the villa and getting in a Jeep home to bae. Didn't… didn't happen though, did it? She is completely ready to shag someone else again, already. I respect it, I treasure it, and I simply cannot wait to watch footage of Joe realising it on Sunday’s Aftersun.

Right: shag, please. This is a shagging show, about shagging. I allowed Jack and Dani to go eight weeks without shagging last year, but this is a show about shagging, and I want to watch the shagging people shag. We’re three weeks in and they should be shagging. Shag! Fucking shag! Tommy Fury fingering like he was trying to pump air into a Nerf gun was good, but it’s not enough! Shag, you idiots! Shag!

@joelgolby