Love Island's Laura has been driven mad, and we are all to blame

Several years ago, the TV psychologist Derren Brown dressed a studio audience up in masks and invited them, via a series of keypad votes, to make life either easy or difficult for a young man on a night out, surrounded by actors and being filmed by hidden cameras.

Did they, for example, want him to a) accidentally get a free round of drinks or b) get overcharged and, then on querying it it, get aggressively thrown out by the bouncers?

Time after time, you won’t be shocked to learn, the audience voted option b, and were having an absolute whale of a time, right up until the point their victim ran seemingly for his life out of the back of a van of pretend armed thugs who’d kidnapped him for lols and then he got run over by a passing lorry.

At this point, the cameras turned on the stunned audience, killers all of them, and who were, of course the real subject of the experiment.

Brown was seeking to demonstrate an old, discredited theory about the deindividuation of people in crowds, who’ll do what they like because they think they can get away with it.

But his critics in social psychology circles later made a sharp point. That the audience had not been stripped of moral virtue but were doing what was expected of them. They were participating in a TV show. Unconsciously incumbent on them was the pressure to provide and receive entertainment.

And so we turn first to Laura and then to ourselves. When they’re all sitting around, thinking Brexit is about trees, bouncing up and down on watermelons and vomiting profiteroles in to each others gobs in super slow motion it’s all such a laugh isn’t it.

But what happens when, to quote the Mattel adverts of the late 1980s, the doll cries real tears?

Laura, by some margin the most grown up rat in the ITV lab, appears to have decided she should fall in love with Wes for no greater reason than it is expected of her.

Wes, meanwhile, nearing the end of week four of eight, has been urged by Adam, the Gateshead Zarathustra, into having a Love Island midlife crisis.

Who knows where it goes next? Will snogging Megan on the daybed be enough? Will we now see him cruising round the open plan kitchen in a mazda sports car that should still be in his pension pot, two too many buttons undone on his floral print shirt?

By the way, if the ladies in there are still confused about Brexit, someone should let them know the surest route to understanding at least the UK side of it would be to watch Wes’s behaviour.

What happens when you try and have your cake and eat it? Well you end up with cake thrown in your face, outside in the cold, loathed by everyone.

So that’s that then. How humbling to think that by the time Romeo and Juliet had been together for as long as Laura and Wes, they had already been dead for nineteen days. Measured in on screen time alone, they lasted a full twenty hour long episodes. Far longer than Cybil and Basil Fawlty, Tim and Dawn from The Office. The next milestone to aim at must surely have been Richard and Judy, and to be fair, that’s enough to unsettle anyone.

Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone, sang Joni Mitchell. Was Laura Wes’s paradise? Maybe not. But in the parking lot role is a former erotic dancer from Essex with no female friends and the satanic smirk of a psychopath.

Still, there’s twelve new housemates arriving tonight and, returning briefly to the Brexit metaphor, Love Island should be restored to the emotional chimpanzee’s tea party we know and love. Cake everywhere.

And at least for a while, hopefully the cameras won’t be pointed at us. Oh and that Eyal should have been hit by the metaphorical lorry won’t cause much distress. He should have seen it coming.