Love Island review: Historians of the future will be rightly appalled by this reality dating show

Love Island is a sobering counterpoint to the great political and social shifts of our times. Particularly the social. In the age of woke and #MeToo

So, £50,000 for winners Amber Gill and Greg O’Shea. Good, and entirely justified because: (1) Amber is the nearest thing to a human on the Island, and (2) she deserves it for sheer stamina, having been there since Ep 1, Day 1, on 3 June.

Tommy “What’s impregnable mean?” Fury wasn’t quite charming enough to win, and he took the flawed Molly-Mae Hague down with him. So to speak.

And that that was that for 2019: 5 million viewers; 36 preening twenty-somethings trying their luck; eight weeks of coupling, uncoupling, mugging and snaking; four couples surviving a show with no actual visible shags (by order of the ITV police, as ever looking to their public reputation and share price, sagging as badly as Curtis’s ball bag).

I always thought I didn’t care that much about it (I don’t) but I did feel some satisfaction that Curtis and Maura came last in the final – natural justice. By contrast, Ovie and India seemed well-matched and were, rather harshly, placed third.

Quite the record of achievement, then. Caroline Flack deserves every penny of the £450,000 she earned for overseeing the shenanigans, about the same as we, as a society, see fit to pay 20 care-home assistants for a year’s work.

If you think of writers – historians and contemporary observers of social conditions – some of the greatest had the knack of being able to take some small vignette of a time, and craft it into some more sweeping judgment about the condition of a nation or people.

What then, would the likes of Niccolo Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, or AJP Taylor make of Love Island? Obviously they’d all despise Curtis, but apart from that, it’s probably a symptom, if not a cause, of Britain’s decline.

Let us examine the totemic Anton Danyluk? All the chaps in Love Island prefer to be smooth and glabrous, so they’re like less-intelligent versions of performing dolphins. But none so much as Anton, who is not only determinedly pube-free, but has his pert, tanned, manly buttocks depilated by his dear auld Scottish mammy, Sherie Ann. On Love Island, this arduous duty (he can’t reach round himself, poor lad), was undertaken by Belle Hassan, and Anton has let it be known (via a commendable exclusive in The Sun) that he’d like for Sherie Ann and Belle to share depilating his arse, in a model of devolved administration that Boris Johnson and Nicola Sturgeon might learn much from. Whenever I’m down in England," announces Anton, “Belle can shave my bum, and my mum can shave my bum in Scotland.”

“If I take that away from my mum completely it takes away a big bonding session with her."

A whole new meaning for the Barnett formula, there. Maybe Carrie and Nicola could do the same for Boris’s blond netherlocks? He looks like he needs sorting out down there, like an old Golden Retriever that’s let himself go a bit.

I have a dream, that one day a female adult will tell Anton to go and shave his own butt. Then we might consider we have gender equality.

The historians of the future will be rightly appalled by the sight of sweet Amy bawling on-air, like she was in the middle of a nervous breakdown – plus there was her humiliation when the awful Curtis asked her to be his “half-girlfriend”. Likewise, whatever it was that Lucie was putting herself through. Any TV company that needs “duty of care” guidelines and a team of mental health professionals on hand to look after the people who’ve been on one of its shows really does need to think again. And not commission two series a year. Still, at least the lie detector challenge has been abolished.

Love Island is a sobering counterpoint to the great political and social shifts of our times. Particularly the social. In the age of woke and #MeToo, here is a world that perhaps reflects a more unwelcome truth about the sexes as we enter the second decade of the 21st century. Also, they neither know nor care what Brexit is.

Lucky them.