Love Island's Hayley is staring at the exit door with much still to learn about Eyal, including his name

That Eyal’s potential attraction to someone should be measured entirely in proportion to the amount of time they have been prepared to dedicate to exclusive study of the subject of Eyal should come as no surprise

Tom Peck
Thursday 07 June 2018 18:57 EDT
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Love Island: Controversial kissing takes places in game of truth and dare

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In 1998, Turkmenistan’s dictatorial ruler Saparmurat Niyazov installed a revolving statue of himself outside his own Presidential Palace, which turned on its axis throughout the day so as to always face the sun.

Two decades later, it cannot be explicitly ruled out that it has been reinstalled in the Love Island car park and dressed in a salmon pink shirt, to rotate in soft focus directly behind the dinner table where Niall and newbie Georgia were doing their level best to discuss the relative merits of chicken dippers.

Either that, or it was in fact A&E doctor Alex, who so enjoyed his own corresponding date with lawyer Rosie that there may even have been eight consecutive seconds of it in which he wasn’t otherwise engaged shifting himself through at least 135 degrees to rubber neck on the others.

What a shame. For some mystifying reason, there had been high hopes for what must surely be Love Island’s first date entirely from the professional classes, particularly after they had moved beyond the early obstacles, where Alex managed to make it to the end of his short monologue on how “our parents must be proud of us” despite Niall and Georgia taking one look at their preprandial glasses of cava and deciding to “just f*cking neck” them.

Oh, Alex, Alex Alex Alex. Will you ever wake from this four day long anxiety dream in which,having gone in to the Love Island villa, a high-achieving, handsome, well qualified and not entirely un-buff young man, you nevertheless conspire to repulse every female in sight?

It is, arguably an act of great foresight on the part of the Love Island producers to have placed Alex in there at all, and thus equip the nation to better understand the rising and dangerous incel movement. If nothing else, Alex can be sure to get a New York Times oped on the redistribution of sex out of it, and maybe even an unlikely friendship with Toby Young.

Still, with a recoupling coming on Friday and the demographics suddenly stacked in the gents’ favour, it is theoretically possible, Alex’s character may evolve beyond suddenly appearing in the back of other people’s storylines like those creepy sisters in The Shining.

None of which is to say Alex is the only one struggling For what feels like the twelfth consecutive night, Eyal again made clear his problem with Hayley is that she “doesn’t know enough” about him.

That Eyal’s potential attraction to someone should be measured entirely in proportion to the amount of time they have been prepared to dedicate to exclusive study of the subject of Eyal should come as no surprise, not least as in an unassailable position at the top of that particular leaderboard will always be Eyal’s one true love, Eyal himself.

It is theoretically possible that, having become distracted by his own reflection for several months last summer, before sending off his application form he had mistaken Love Island for Celebrity Mastermind, and imagined he was now jetting off to Mallorca to watch a panel of women answer quiz questions about Eyal in a competitive format in which Eyal is the prize.

And thusly, we were treated to the bizarre spectacle of Hayley mysteriously seeking to stave off a third consecutive micro-dumping in as many days, by frantically reeling off all the information she had gleaned on the subject of Eyal thus far. “You’ve got two brothers! You’ve got a sister! You’ve got a dog! You like nature!” A commendable effort, if a touch undermined moments later, when talking through the ups and downs of her time with Eyal thus far it took her a full ten seconds to remember her partner’s name. “What’s his name? God what’s his name?” she asked. Whether not knowing it at all was an improvement on the day before, when she appeared to think it was Eeyore, is a matter of personal taste.

“Well Hayley, you’re specialist subject was Eyal and you got four correct answers there and one pass, and that was ‘What is Eyal’s name?’ to which the answer is in fact, Eyal.”

In the more straightforward challenge of Dressing up as a Superhero in order to Compromise the Structural Integrity of a Watermelon Using Only Your Arse, I confess I cannot recall how Hayley or indeed anyone got on, because the real trauma was to come shortly after in Truth or Dare.

There only appeared to be one dare, which was "kiss the person you most fancy," which let's face it is always going to be an effective way to spice up any social occasion, and in around four moves stretched a new and spectacularly distorted web of truth over 72 hour old lies.

Indeed if the current affections of the Love Island inmates were mapped out on in London Underground format it is currently Kendall in the Kings Cross St Pancras role. Already Niall has interchanged there to get to Georgia, and the Adam train looks set to pull out tomorrow, bound for the new and shiny terminals at Rosie International.

That Adam and Kendall have developed a particularly weary sideline in bickering like a married couple of three decades standing just 72 hours after becoming aware of one another’s existence is curious. But it appears crushingly obvious that it will all be ammunition in Adam’s unimpressive arsenal, when by this time tomorrow he has almost certainly dumped Kendall under the flimsiest of pretexts, in scenes not seen on British TV since Alan Partridge was forced to sack the entire staff of Pear Tree Productions for reasons ranging from having left a coffee cup out to tutting too often.

"You're insecure....you're named after a mint cake, you consistently reject my dry-boke-inducing begging requests to kiss you..." That kind of thing.

All of which has left us precious little time for Jack and Dani, whose general strategy appears to be to bamboozle one another into having no clue what the other feels and then in a moment of emotional vertigo intimated at in last night’s closing credits, frantically snog one another as if there’s only two minutes left to go at the lower school disco, and dad’s Mondeo has been seen swinging in to the car park.

And the moral of the story? Well, that will surely come tomorrow night, when, having now war-gamed the various scenarios for some time, the chances of Hayley not being on the first flight home look vanishingly small. If you’re going to spend a week in bed with someone, do try and take a vague interest in such weighty questions as what their name is.

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