Love Island review: After four weeks of unmitigated tedium, everyone in the villa has gone absolutely certifiably loony

Has it happened overnight? Or has it been four weeks of the Love Island producers, carefully tending to their sadistic psychological experiment to bring us to this high crescendo of cacaphonic neurosis?

One of the favourite devices of the American motivational speaking racket is the untrue story Chinese bamboo tree. You plant it, you water it, you fertilise it, every day, for five years, and nothing happens. And then, suddenly, in the fifth summer, woomph! Out it comes from the ground and shoots ninety feet in the air in just five weeks.

“Does it grow ninety feet in five weeks,” they like to ask, “or five years?”

Five years, of course. Success doesn’t come at once. It takes years of planning. Years of paying large amounts of money to snake oil selling life coaches without ever seeing any return, until one day...you get the picture.

All of which is a needlessly long winded to say that after four weeks of unmitigated tedium, everyone in the Love Island villa has gone absolutely certifiably loony. Has it happened overnight? Or has it been four weeks of the Love Island producers, carefully tending to their sadistic psychological experiment to bring us to this high crescendo of cacaphonic neurosis?

Because there was Amy, on her iPad, writing a fifty point list of reasons she hates Curtis, a bloke she’d never once clapped eyes on all of four weeks ago. Now she wails about the “future you’ve taken from me.” Curtis, meanwhile, just stares into the middle distance, part Colonel Kurtz, part Bruce Wayne replaying childhood memories of being stuck down a well.

“The fabled half boyfriend half girlfriend couple,” now stand reduced, to what. Eighth boyfriend? A sixteenth girlfriend? Never say never, but if you were wanting to decimalise it would start with 0.0 recurring. Either way, as of now, there are at least five sevenths of pure revulsion there.

Lucie, meanwhile has gone full Stacy from Wayne’s World. It will surely not be long before Tommy is pulled for yet another “chat”, only to be gifted a gun rack she has somehow whittled from the patio decking.

Michael has managed to place himself at angle x in what is not Love Island’s first but perhaps it’s most vicious hate triangle. Amber hates Michael. All the girls hate Michael. Michael, if he’s honest, hates himself. And that leaves precious little room for everyone else.

And, naturally, soaring above it all, Molly-Mae and Tommy, who have put the fifty grand in the sat nav and, guess what, the roads are completely clear.

One can be too cynical about these things, but they look like the real deal. I confidently predict they will make it all the way to the end of their contractually mandated six months together. Best of luck guys.