Love Island week 5 recap: Fighting, crying, lap dancing and more fighting

This was the grumpiest week so far on Love Island, with multiple strands of drama and much fighting.

I won’t confuse you by analysing everyone in the now bulging love villa, but just attempt to make sense of the main stories.

At the beginning of the week the original boys were in the Casa Amor, being tended to by new females. This is a show where the promise of fleeting fame is delivered by sexual allure.

The casting couch isn’t used to populate the show. It is the show, and the new girls were suitably painted and pliant. The original girls were in the old villa, beset by new males.

Megan the shuddering hottie was surrounded by dribbling admirers; she chose a man with large spectacles called Alex, leaving Wes, who had abandoned Laura for her, without a sideways glance. I think Megan can’t survive without male attention for even 15 seconds.

She is lovely, cynical and heartless, and she is the show’s new villain because Love Island can’t be honest with itself.

The advertisers wouldn’t like it. It’s a whorehouse quoting Jane Austen, and it can’t admit that Megan, the sexually immoral narcissist with an attention span of 15 seconds, is really its soul.

Sometimes I wonder if she really exists, or is a hologram sponsored by Tinder. There was a scene of great cruelty and great TV: Dani was shown a video of Jack, her faithful pen-seller, realising that his ex-girlfriend was in Casa Amor, presumably to get him back.

In this cracked morality of Love Island, this is wrong. Of course, Jack stayed loyal – he knows that he and Dani will win this by being wholesome in hell – and if he had strayed, that would have been the video Dani was shown.

Her tears would have been real, not speculative. But Dani cried obediently, a Reality TV trooper who knows what is expected from her archetype, which is Girl Next Door, now literally.

Love Island's Caroline Flack: 'It's not about sex, it's about relationships'

“This always happens to me,” she moaned, make-up sprinting down her face, “it’s like I’m not allowed to be happy”.

Elsewhere in Casa Amor, Josh, the beloved of feisty Georgia, strayed with a glossy hot woman with a bun on her head.

I need to name her to remind myself she is real, and capable of being hurt. Her name is Kazimir. They re-coupled in their respective villas; the original girls only knew if their partners had stayed loyal when they walked in with their new girlfriends, or not.

Dani wept tears of relief when Jack walked in alone, preening with his new-found ability to treat women well, which seems to amaze him more than anyone else.

Meghan looked stunned when she realised that Wes had waited for her, because she waits for no one.

Georgia screamed at Josh repeatedly, but Josh stuck with Kazimir because she doesn’t yet shout at him. But in Love Island the road from concubine to wife is a short one.

Jack’s ex-girlfriend told Dani that Jack has a photograph of her father, the actor Danny Dyer, on his bedroom wall.

For the first time Jack, who boasts that he can sell anything, looked shifty and uneasy; is he after an Essex princess, and behaving himself for that end?

Love Island | Read more

He admitted he treated the ex-girlfriend – her name is Ellie – like “s***” as an exercise in damage limitation, but she was booted off soon after, alongside Alpha slag Adam, who had a late redemption.

He realised he couldn’t make out with his Casa Amor concubine Darylle because he missed his woman before that, who was called Zara. If you are a very bad person does Love Island make you nicer? It seems possible.

The rest of the week was fighting. Megan pretended to care that Laura hates her – she doesn’t care, or she wouldn’t have stolen Wes.

“You were wearing my shoes that night you cracked on with Wes,” shouted Laura. For Megan that is only a small betrayal, and she looked stunned again.

Megan is back with Wes now, because spectacles man Alex was booted out. Even before he left, Megan was busy betraying him: “I still fancy you,” she told Wes in the childlike lisp of the authentic porn goddess.

His amazingly straight hairline glistened. He treats Megan like a football match he has no intention of losing, which is exactly the right thing to do.

Laura was also pointlessly angry with Georgia because Georgia tried to kiss her boyfriend, who is also called New Jack; New Jack told Laura this, and then, when he kissed Laura to plight his troth, her back bent over like a dentist’s chair reclining.

If it was consensual, it didn’t look like it. She was kissing for ratings, for a validation, for a future.

Had Georgia tried to kiss Jack? In the absence of evidence, they all started swearing at each other and stomping around on their over-tall heels.

It’s getting to them: the heat; the cameras; the claustrophobia; the endless days empty of anything but being conventionally sexually attractive in the service of selling suntan lotion for Superdrug.

What to do? The producers decided a mass lap-dance was the way through, by men and women. Their heart rates were recorded as they were danced on, and the results read out, an experiment that is possibly more intimate than sex.

The women were more stimulated by the men said the data; but we can’t know that it wasn’t panic.