Love Island's Hayley and Charlie depart, as the public choose the 'friendship couple' over the 'undisguised loathing couple'

Hayley's short time in the villa is now over, presenting the immediate question of whether the whole thing was in fact a Bloomsbury Group style prank or piece of performance art

If we are to assume, perhaps wrongly, that the Love Island voting audience reflects the general demographic of its contestants, they must be commended at once for displaying wisdom far beyond their years.

Anyone in their late thirties and above knows only too well the feeling, usually experienced while juggling competing dinner party invitations, of having to choose which couple they like best between the “friendship couple” and the “undisguised loathing couple”. And so in wisely selecting Alex and Samira to stay on, and kicking Hayley and Charlie out, the younger generation seems well prepared for the long decades of misery that lie ahead of them.

In fact, the entire series, conceived we presume as a light-hearted hedonistic night vision enhanced f*ckfest, has become all the more enjoyable for its unlikely transmogrification into a nightly public education film on coping with failed relationships.

Alex and Samira, complete strangers not two weeks ago, are now well into the “companion” stage of a relationship Alex describes, with all the heartbreaking optimism of a middle aged man trying to ignore the ever-increasing hours his wife is spending at “book club” without really seeming to be troubling any books, as a “friendship couple”.

“The thing is darling, I just don’t love you anymore.”

“I know that, but we’re a friendship couple, aren’t we? Aren’t we? We can still go on dates?”

However long they remain we cannot know, but I give it one week before Alex is arriving in the communal bedroom with a birthday gun rack like the un-dumpable girlfriend from Wayne’s World.

All of which brings us on to Hayley, whose short time in the Love Island villa is now over, presenting the immediate question of whether the whole thing was in fact a Bloomsbury Group style prank or piece of performance art.

Charlie, to his credit, knew the game was up, and wisely spent the second half of last night’s episode not optimistically hoping for salvation but pre-apportioning blame for his premature departure.

He had already worked out it was not strictly his fault that he had managed only five days in the villa, before being eaten alive by a human phagocyte with faultless hair extensions.

In her final hours Hayley, who has consistently demonstrated she does not possess the standard range of human emotions required to be “compatible” with anything much beyond a plant pot, just berated Charlie for her own unpreparedness to do what every Love Island contestant past, present and future has done. Which is to keep your eye on the ultimate prize of twenty five grand and a taste of immortality on Instagram and be fully aware at all times that it frankly doesn’t matter who you have to pretend to be hopelessly in love with to get there.

Vaguely in Hayley’s defence, having never heard of Brexit, it can’t expressly be ruled out that she has never heard of Love Island either, and instead imagined herself to have been living in some kind of virtual reality dating app, and having mentally swiped left on everyone in there without a moment’s hesitation, never fully understood why they didn’t all have the good grace to just disappear and be replaced by someone better, perhaps with as many as forty eight distinct abdominal muscles and none of the confusingly wide vocabulary of a biro salesman from Swanley.

Either that, or she will eventually come to realise she had in fact been nothing more than a contestant on a particularly cruel game show all along, develop a liking for it and become one of those curious, faintly recognisable people that constantly pop up on Eggheads, The Chase, Bargain Hunt and everything in between, applying her own revolutionary strategy to each.

“Okay Hayley, you’re on £32,000. If you get this wrong you lose nothing but you might as well have a go. For £64,000 what is the capital of Peru?"

“At the end of the day I’m just not going to rush in to answering that, you know. Other people maybe they’ll tell you it’s Paris or Birkenhead or whatever but that’s just not me you know. It’s not who I am.”

“Well if he’s got a seven Susie then I’m really happy for him but at the end of the day I’m not gonna just come up with a word in thirty seconds just because you or anybody else wants me to and if that means I’m not gonna win then that’s fine.”

“If she wants to go on your first whistle John then that’s up to her but if I don’t want to go on your second whistle then that’s my decision isn’t it and if me and that zipwire are just not compatible then sometimes that’s just how it is you know.”

Among the remaining contestants, Megan is pursuing an interesting line in turning the entire villa against Georgia, whose crimes appear to extend to being twenty years old, being on a free holiday in Mallorca and doing such outrageous things as dive bombing into the pool at the unholy hour of 10.30pm.

Frankly, Georgia should know better. You’re not there to have fun, little girl. That time you’re wasting could frankly be put to better use, doing the preferred thing, which is isolating the other contestants one by one, dragging them off in to disparate corners for clandestine chats, and instead re-casting this weird conglomerate of personal trainers, pen salesmen and glamour models and as nineteenth-century cavalry and infantry regiments to be shuffled around as though the villa were, in fact, the Afghan steppe in the Great Game.

And if all that’s too much hassle, then at least do the preferred alternative, which is weeping.

What we do know, however, is that Rosie has “got her back”, as she reassured Georgia in terms that in no way sounded unthreatening, and which intimate that, however tedious Love Island series four threatens to become, it is at least building to a grand finale that will be worth waiting for.

And that will be Rosie finally cracking, shooting the sh*t out of Adam, blowing up an oil tanker in the daily challenge, holding up the kitchen area by threatening to pour full fat milk in everyone’s tea (and skimmed in Jack’s), before the two of them strap on their headscarves, jumping into a nearby Chevy, then gun it over the astroturf and straight in to the infinity pool as the credits roll.