Love Island catch up: Why is Joe having a meltdown over a marshmallow?

It’s a funny old game, isn’t it? This manufacturing of human emotion just for a brief taste of the big time, doing paid-for endorsements on Instagram

In a country sent mad by Brexit, conventional wisdom now appears to be that “punching above your weight” is somehow a wise and noble thing to do. Britain, we have been led to believe, “punches above its weight” in all sorts of things.

Back in the real world, if you punch above your weight you get knocked out. And, over in the Love Island villa, in the unforgiving glare of the fire pit, Tommy Fury unified the belts in the heavyweight division with a single devastating blow.

Maura fought a good fight but she went in too hard, too fast. Fury drew the fire in the early rounds and waited for his moment. All it took was a moment of exposure – not usually a crime in Love Island – and wallop!

It’s a funny old game, isn’t it? This manufacturing of human emotion just for a brief taste of the big time, doing paid-for endorsements on Instagram. For what, exactly, are all these young people gleefully regressing to the kind of dating game once practised in the primary school playground?

This latest episode rolled straight into Love Island Aftersun (more like a kind of aftercare for Love Island alumni) where the contestants – having sacrificed their public dignity on an altar to absolutely nothing – appear to lack any sustainable role than to provide analysis for future hopefuls running the same foolish errand they did.

Why is Lucie weeping into her pashmina? Why is Joe having what looks like to be a nervous breakdown over the subject of a marshmallow that was thrown underarm across a kitchen by his “girlfriend of nine days”? The prize for which they compete is absolutely no more than to be back again next year, doing toe curling video segments, making pulled pork sandwiches with the mothers of that years competitors.

All of which is to say, it is all very, very, very boring indeed.