For middle class Love Island viewers, Dr Alex was the child that fell in the gorilla enclosure. He is already missed

What does it say about social mobility in Britain today, that Love Island’s solitary middle class contestant should make it so very close to the grand final, despite an eight week “journey” that progressed only from instant sexual revulsion to baffled endearment, and at no point coming any closer to love than he will to an Instagram deal with Hawaiian Tropic?

Probably nothing, but in the meantime, farewell Dr Alex. You leave the Love Island villa having shaped new contours for reality television. To end up mentally scarred after such a deeply manipulative experience is nothing new. To end up physically disfigured may be a first.

In Whatsapp groups all over the land, actual sweepstakes were run on the day Alex’s neon skin would finally ascend from vermilion to bronze. People tuned in just to see it, a grim televisual FOMO arguably not seen since the summer of Madge Bishop’s deathbed in Neighbours.

Decades from now, when you get wheeled into some A&E near Swansea, don’t be surprised to see some ageing familiar face staring back at you in all its crimson bioluminescent glory. The damage, will surely now last for ever. The question really is whether the public should feel guilty, having watched on gladly at this modern re-emergence of the sad tale of those Victorian child chimney sweeps whose faces would still be black with soot well into their fifties.

Indeed, as an A&E doctor, one imagines Alex has encountered his fair share of objects that have become lodged in places they frankly should not, but none, in the end, can have proved so mysterious as how he came to be jammed in a villa in Mallorca for so very very long, hopelessly grafting away with a neverending succession of hopelessly unsuitable women, for no greater cause than to mildly disgust the nation.

It is not something one imagines he will be able to explain away to future generations, as if it were simply a bizarre mishap featuring a length of plastic piping, a cigarette lighter and a now suffocated hamster.

One thing, however, is certain. We will be seeing Dr Alex’s like again. For Love Island’s vast swathes of self-appointed superior, middle-class viewers, Dr Alex was the child that fell into the gorilla enclosure.

The utter triumph of the Dr Alex character will now surely make his kind a feature as indispensable to all future Love Island series. Where X Factor now depends utterly on a Wagner, a Rylan, a Honey G or the Bee Gees impersonating guy from the chicken factory, Love Island will now, surely, always have a Dr Alex.

It was a stroke of genius, really. He has been the white man in old, gently racist Hollywood movies about Africa, the audience dropped in the story, Alex in Wonderland.

He has been the rap of panic in the chest, the flashing red warning light (quite literally), the one that, Jesus Christ, could actually be you in there, stuck down King Solomon’s Mines, or being forced to lap dance for a crushingly embarrassed air hostess and an actual lap dancer.

That could actually be you, being schooled in front of your own mum by the mum of a makeup artist you mysteriously considered yourself to be better than (a sentiment, by the way, with which even your own mum didn’t appear to agree).

It could be you, claiming to have “always been honest” and “trying to do the right thing” by dumping Alexandra before leaving the villa, even if you were sussed out within seconds by no brighter light than Scarlet Moffat from Gogglebox, who on Love Island Aftersun made the rather smart point that in fact, Alex just wants to be single when he comes out, and into the bright light of his fifteen nanoseconds of fame.

With the end of the unending Love Island summer almost upon us, for the most part, only the nice guys are left, and only the very nicest ones will still be standing at the end.

It didn’t even take Danny Dyer dialling in on Skype to call his future son-in-law a “proper geezer” to make the inevitable even more inevitable.

In the meantime, as Dr Alex rides off in his red Ferrari, with his red skin, into the red sunset, crushingly alone, he takes with him the last vestiges of car crash intrigue, at least until next year.