Love Island season 4 episode 1 review: Your summer ends here

The reality TV monolith is back and threatens to steal an unprecedented amount of your time

It was with a heavy heart that I tuned into ITV2 last night, or rather secured a stream of it after a mini 'Forgot password?' ordeal with the app player, it having been a whole year since I've actually had cause to watch the channel. I felt like a junkie, squeezing a blob of tanning oil onto a gilded spoon and heating it over a flame. Was I really going to start doing this to myself again?

"Are you watching" I messaged a friend, no question mark required nor specificity on which show, so deeply has Love Island permeated national culture by this point. "No, I couldn't bring myself to enter into something terrible," they replied, before adding "Oh who am I kidding."

And so I settled in for the feature-length launch episode of series 4, realising with a mixture of delight and terror that by the time the week is out over six hours of Love Island content will have aired, not including sister shows and official podcasts (yes, that's a thing now). I'd relapsed, and was staring down the barrel of eight weeks of toxic romantic entanglements and re-coupling ceremonies. Sorry, all creative and life goals I was hoping to achieve this summer.

(ITV2)

The temptation when you have a cheap-to-produce reality show blow up into a TV phenomenon is to throw money and grandeur at it, to style the Love Island villa's garden like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, introduce turrets that fire lurid jugs of Woo Woo to challenges and have dates take place on the ISS. Fortunately, the producers were smart enough to realise that part of the show's charm is in its naffness, in its IKEA showroom aesthetic and stock footage cutaways, and so changed little in terms of location and format for the new series.

The show lives and dies on the strength of its contestants, though, and the collection of living humans who went in last night didn't really show a huge amount of potential. There was the trademark posh but trendy guy, curdling the blood when uttering sentences like "oh that's sick fam" in an Etonian accent, the cursory Essex boy, and early frontrunner Dani Dyer, but the rest of the contestants felt inane to the point of tedium. The fact that casting for Love Island feels as though it's conducted with tranq darts and a giant net on the dance floor of a provincial Oceana is intrinsic to the show's appeal, but boy did they excel themselves in terms of barely sentient Barbies and Kens this year. Celebrated daughter Dyer comes the closest to a discernible personality and seems very sweet, though I fear her introduction could lead to minor celebrities invading Love Island, wish would be the death of the show such is its everyman/woman appeal.

Still, it takes a while for Love Island to get going, specifically until attachments form between contestants which are then tested with increasingly sadistic and cruel twists that break people. That's the good stuff. God I hate myself.

Love Island airs on ITV2 at 9pm nightly until the Sun supernovas and swallows the Earth.