Love Island review: I’m being paid to watch bad television. What’s your excuse?

Wealthy heir Ollie has been in the papers recently for shooting dumb animals, which is quite ironic once you get to meet him

Coupling up is always a tricky business, whether here on our own dank little isles of hate, or on the alternative TV reality that is Love Island.

The tensions on the ITV2 show are as palpable as ever; the emotional immaturity painful to observe. Love Island is the mating game, hopeful singles looking for "the one", but with added intensity. After all, there’s a £50,000 prize and a couple of years of D-list celebrity at stake before the nervous breakdown. In the meantime, maybe they’ll bag a week or two on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here; a guest spot on The Chase; an appearance at Southwark Crown Court charged with affray after a misunderstanding at a night club...

The vacuous and otherwise forgettable Something Flack has been replaced by Laura Someone. Otherwise the "winter series" is more of the same: fancy villa, champagne, gorgeous but oddly unsexy young people doing sod-all in swimwear.

Anyway, I’ve already decided who my favoured Love Islander is: Siannise Fudge. She's a 25-year-old beauty consultant from Bristol (which means precisely nothing). Her name sounds like one of the few things left that you can still be prosecuted for under Britain’s obscenity laws. She claims that she loves her unusual name because it “makes me feel really unique”, which is true enough, but she’d be even more unique, if you’ll pardon the expression, if she wed someone called Barr or Baker or Finger, and chose to hyphenate their married surname.

As it happens, “I absolutely don’t like fudge”, and she prefers the nickname "Princess Jasmine" anyway.

For now, Fudgie is stuck with builder Nas Majeed, whom she specifically rejected on the grounds of his garish shorts (rather than the contents thereof), and also because he is literally too short for her. Maybe he should have covered half his torso in tats, because that’s what scaffolder Callum did, and he managed to pull Shaughna, no trouble. Shaughna works as a Democratic Services Officer – something to do with the local council and MPs. She apparently wants someone she “can watch the news with”. Well, God knows what she and Callum are going to do now that the Labour leadership contest is getting under way.

Mike, in his tropical two-piece, used to be footballer and is now a police officer. He's coupled up with Leanne, but he’d rather, one suspects, be fussed over by The Twins – Eve and Jess Gale. Eve and Jess are students and VIP hostesses and, inevitably, blonde. I think Mike is under the impression that they are a package deal, a sort of buy-one get-one-free offer. In due course, I am confident he will be told to BOGOF himself.

The Love Islander I like the least is wealthy heir Ollie, who has been in the papers recently for shooting dumb animals, which is quite ironic once you get to meet him. The girl who was forced to couple up with him – blonde singer Paige Turley – immediately tried to dump him for a coffee bean salesman (not a euphemism) by the name of Connor. Connor tells us he flew to Thailand because he saw something on the web about getting whiter teeth, but he came back with a gob like Princess Anne. Money well spent, Connor, money well spent.

Every time I write something about Love Island, I get comments along the lines of: “If you hate it so much why do you watch it?” Of course, the obvious answer to that is that I’m employed to review bad television, and if someone wasn’t paying me to endure it of course I wouldn’t be watching Love Island. What’s your excuse?

Love Island continues each night at 9pm on ITV2