Love Island review: The men seem biologically incapable of listening

You don’t necessarily even need to have noticed the Trump state visit, or the ongoing Tory leadership contest to know that we live in times that prize above all else the greatest distance a person can put between their own opinion of themselves and reality.

Modern life has a pre-2008 crash feel about it. If you could buy shares in non-securitised self belief, now feels like the moment to short the market.

It is a world, in short, in which a 24-year-old Scottish gym instructor called Anton Danyluk, whose mum shaves his arse for him, can dare to dream as big as he likes. Today Love Island. Tomorrow, the temporary Instagram face for a new range of in-car air fresheners. But the day after that, the universe will belong to him.

Day two in the villa and we’re already in full Attenborough mode, the men outnumbering the women, seven to five and thus are forced to make daring D-Day style raids upon them like beta male walruses on to the mating beaches.

Human life likes to imagine itself to have civilised the process within the last few thousand years, so it is endearing in its way to see it all stripped back again to first principles. Tommy Fury, brother of Tyson, and this year’s best impersonation of Clive James’s famous description of Arnold Schwarzenegger, namely “a condom full of walnuts,” has decided the way to Lucie’s affections is straightforward burglary.

He also appears not to have worked out that, even on Love Island, once the rival males have been defeated, namely Anton and the sandwich boy, Lucie may yet have some agency in the matter.

And he appears not to have worked this out, because he, like the rest, appear biologically incapable of listening.

Love Island’s feminist credentials are a matter of keen debate, but it does appear to deserve some credit for at least televising, if nothing else, what must surely be one of the sisterhood’s greatest barriers to justice. Which is that, where a woman’s interests do not align with a man’s, they simply do not enter the man’s head.

Lucie has been in the villa barely a day, and has already spent at least seven hours patiently explaining to all concerned that she would simply like to be left alone, so love can seedily bloom with her Ciabatta Sun God, and yet they cannot hear.

Anton, has been patiently told, in seeming slow motion, that she doesn’t want to know, and this is information not that he cannot process but that cannot even penetrate his systems.

And then, there is Tommy, standing by the fire pit, actively apologising for what he is about to do, knowing it is wrong, and then doing it anyway,

The ladies, meanwhile, have safety in numbers, which partly explains the nonchalance with which Yewande appears to be establishing her own private corner of the villa, as a kind of personal Einstein style Institute for Advanced Studies, where eventually, who knows, she may come to work out, that she has signed up for, and is competing in, a competitive dating reality TV show. Thus far, the presence of boys appears to be little more than an unexplained inconvenience to her, as she makes her way from sun lounger to sun lounger as if looking for a lost flip flop at somebody else’s pool party.

These are the comparatively simple early hours. There is a strand of biological science that likes to see flesh as the mere, temporary vessel for the true life force, the genes, who must force their bearers to reproduce or else face extinction. And thus it is on Love Island, where our seven male contestants face a frantic six days of Sex or Death. Uncoupled come Sunday and it’s the first flight home for you. Expect things to turn febrile, and fast.

Love Island continues each night on ITV2 at 9pm.