Love Island, week 2 recap: a masterclass in what a handsome face can do to the human spirit
It is almost week 3 on Love Island and the producers might be ripping their faces off.
The villains aren’t that villainous; rather, the noise emitting from the villa with fake grass is little more than a series of sequential coos, and this is a problem.
No one watches Reality TV to watch people hug. They want real pain, and so last week, and the defenestration of Gentle Kendall, was a good week for Love Island and a bad week for the Enlightenment.
I hope Gentle Kendall is promoted at the shoe shop and has a swift recovery from the Love Island which was, in her case, so loveless.
Instead there are two semi-villains, one almost hairless male victim, and one disappearance – Niall who hates his ears left for personal reasons too secret to be divulged.
The semi-villains are Adam, who is a moral masterclass in what a conventionally handsome face can do to the human spirit (the answer is nothing good) and Eyal, a smug toy person with curly hair who looks like he lies about voting Labour.
Adam’s act of semi-villainy was to tell the new girl Meghan, who is fantastically hot and slick, that he thought Rosie, who he is apparently in a relationship with, was “materialistic”.
Has the villa become a semi-nude Franciscan abbey by mistake and Rosie contravened its sacred code? Meghan skipped off, breasts bouncing alarmingly, to tell Rosie she was materialistic.
Rosie, clearly delighted by the drama, “confronted” Adam and pretended to cry while doing something extraordinary with her mouth.
The problem was that no one cares about Rosie after what she did to Gentle Kendall.
Adam shrugged the big shrug of a man who knows there’s a Rosie around every corner waiting to be lied to, and lied about reforming, and Rosie forgave him because she knows what he is, and without Adam she can’t stay in the villa and become famous for doing nothing at all.
Eyal continued to torment Alex, the middle-class doctor who I thought was a villain but isn’t, because Meghan chose him for a pretend “relationship” and not Alex.
There is a good deal of homoeroticism in this bragging, which I hope Eyal is aware of, and it gave Alex an opportunity to road-test a series of agonised sexless expressions.
What is a man in a maybe sex villa who is having no sex, and has no promise of sex? (He and Samira, the best person in the villa, are in a platonic couple for reasons that have not been explained).
A big nothing apparently. Alex is popular, and the rest of couples think Meghan should be having sex with him because they like him and detest Eyal, who is detestable. They want to give Meghan to Alex as a gift.
If the occupants of the villa are living the manifesto of Incel, the misogynistic “Involuntarily Celibate” movement, they don’t know it.
There was also a re-coupling (yes it isn’t a real word) but it wasn’t dramatic because women were choosing and when women choose they don’t really choose.
Rather, they ask men if it’s OK to choose them – for example Hayley and the new boy Charlie, who has a burnt nose.
Love Island's Caroline Flack: 'It's not about sex, it's about relationships'
Desperate for drama, the producers asked the couples to choose the two least compatible couples, so the public could vote on who to evict while eating take-away food on sofas.
They chose Samira and Alex because they aren’t sexually involved and Hayley and Charlie because Hayley is very annoying.
Then the girls turned their malice to Georgia for “wanting to be the centre of attention”, oblivious, perhaps, to the fact that they are all appearing on ITV2.
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The eviction was brief and pitiless. Caroline Flack walked on with her psychopathic stare. It seems the British public do have taste, even if they are watching Love Island.
They voted to keep Alex and Samira so Charlie and Hayley slunk out in a puddle of mutual recrimination.
Hayley whined that she hadn’t found anyone she was compatible with, which is a human right on Love Island, unless you are Samira.
Charlie asked, not unreasonably, why she had chosen him if they were incompatible. She didn’t answer and instead fled on spindly legs, muttering something about being true to herself.
On Sunday night two new girls will enter the house. One said she liked emotionally unavailable men. Another said she would fall in love with a loaf of bread if it said the right things to her.
Except bread can’t speak. Or perhaps it can on Love Island. I will tell you more in seven days.