Patrick Freyne on Love Island: ‘Cheeky’ is barely a personality these days. It’s just the chemical steady state for lads in the UK

Love Island is back. I’ve been sick for a couple of weeks, so I feel a little like Patrick Pearse’s consumptive waif, Eoghainín na nÉan, as I watch the migratory hunks return to the island for the warmer months. “At the summer’s end, when the hunks leave, I shall leave with them,” I say to my wife, and then I cough pathetically.

It’s nice to see the hunks. We meet them first in the wild, going about their jobs before striding from their workplaces, shedding clothes as they go. Amber, a childminder, is clearing up toys before giving notice in disgust. We see Indiyah eating a customer’s chips at the hotel where she works. Dami, a Dubliner, looks through a microscope before shedding his hazmat suit. (Dublin is, as the IDA keeps reminding us, a major centre for Sexy Science.) The message is clear: Their true vocation is hunkery.

There’s more. Gemma rides a horse, which is a kind of job. Tasha dances in shorts on a roof. This means she either has no job or has the best job of all. Paige stops her labour as an ambulance paramedic to don a bikini and walk off, leaving the NHS with a rostering problem. Presumably a man is bleeding on the footpath just out of shot, such is her commitment to the lust landmass we celebrate here today.

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As each participant is introduced to us a camera circles them so they can loom and flex beside some plastic love hearts. This year, for some reason, there’s a bit in which each of them monopolises the kind of ball pit beloved by toddlers. I like to think that in each instance they’re ruining some child’s birthday party. “The hunks!” I cry weakly in my fever. “Look at the wonderful hunks.”

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Before long we’re at the secret rendition site at which the bulk of the show is filmed. Each year the hunks are gathered there so that the sun may rise and the harvest will be good. The girls arrive at the villa in the traditional manner: sticking out of the sunroofs of individual jeeps, because the Love Islanders love love but hate the environment.

Three of the lads describe themselves as ‘cheeky’, which is barely a personality these days. It’s just the chemical steady state for lads in the UK

Laura “Lord Summerisle” Whitmore emerges to officiate proceedings. There has been a change in the rules, she tells them. This creates consternation. Don’t such changes require a referendum? Instead of each girl vying for a guy, couples have already been assigned to one another by an online vote.

The first boy emerges. It is Dami, the Dublin microbiologist. He tells us that he has a heart-shaped birthmark on his penis. He brings it up again in the second episode. Playwrights call this “Chekhov’s gun”. Dami’s penis will definitely make an appearance before this series is out. “I’ll probably showcase it eventually because nobody believes it,” he says sadly.

Three of the lads describe themselves as “cheeky”, which is barely a personality these days. It’s just the chemical steady state for lads in the UK. One of them, Ikenna, even calls himself a “Cheeky Chappie”, which I believe is a hereditary title, like “Lord”. More hopefully, however, he says he has “a wandering eye”, which I take to mean it’s googly and on a stalk. He speaks about his passion for arses. “I need something I can put my head on to rest,” he says, raising a whole heap of questions.

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Liam, another of the cheeky people, is a student and a philosophical sort. “I wonder about things like ‘How does a grape go from a grape to a raisin?’” he says. “Mad,” he adds in amazement. Whenever I see Liam sitting in silence I know he’s still wondering about this and probably will be, decades hence, when death claims him.

Then there’s Luca Bish, whose torso is chaos itself. Every time he falls asleep, passing tattooists just have a go on him. Someone somewhere is writing a thesis called The Meaning of Luca Bish. On his right shoulder I can see the face of Einstein. Below that sits Muhammad Ali. On his chest sit two feathers. There’s a scorpion on his lower abdomen to the right. There’s a rose to the left. In the middle is the date 1995. On his left shoulder sits the Virgin Mary. What things has this effigy of Our Lady seen? Filthy things. If this was Ireland in the 1980s this image of Mary would start weeping blood, and then Luca would be declared a sexy shrine.

Anyway, each of these paragons of manhood is coupled up with a young woman. Some couples look happier about this than others. We get momentary snapshots of each of them. Dami and Amber, in particular, look like the pitchfork-wielding couple in Grant Wood’s American Gothic, but sexy.

They all make small talk. Paige says that her favourite sex position is the “broken eagle”. Luca says his favourite sex position is called “something oyster”. If you zoom in you can see his tattoo of Mary shaking her head.

“I’ve got 12 horses at home,” Gemma tells her paramour Liam, who, distracted by his deep thoughts about the transmutation of grape to raisin, responds, “You must have a big house.”

Davide looks like Love Island scientists have been engaging with forbidden hunk science in a flagrant mockery of the laws of hunk nature

Gemma’s a dressage champion. This is interpreted by one Love Islander as meaning she likes to “teach horses to dance”, which feels right. “You want fame? Well, fame costs, and right here is where you start paying—in sweat,” I picture Gemma saying to horses in leg warmers.

Then the producers throw in a wild card. His name is Davide, and he is Italian. If God is a hunk, this is what he looks like—all abs and pecs and biceps and square jaws and wearing just shorts. He tells us that people call him a “Greek god” or “the Italian Stallion”, and it just sounds like a fact and not a boast. Davide looks like Love Island scientists have been engaging with forbidden hunk science in a flagrant mockery of the laws of hunk nature. The other hunks are but flickering shadows of Davide’s ur-hunk. He looks like he’s a hunk in more than just the four dimensions that we can perceive. All of the girls just gawp at him. Even the tattoo of the Virgin Mary on Luca’s shoulder mouths the words “hubba hubba!” before fanning herself with her halo.

It is Davide’s job to break up one of the existing couples. He takes this very seriously. Sometimes he dons spectacles to contemplate the grave task before him. This just makes him seem even hunkier, as though his eyes are the flexing biceps of his face. He consults charts. Things move very slowly on the island.

Over the next few days there are party games that involve people climbing on each other and sticking toes in one another’s mouths. New people come to the island from the world beyond. Everyone has nefarious schemes, and they love talking about them. It’s like Dangerous Liaisons but with more visible abs and fewer vitamin deficiencies. “I like Andrew, but it’s not Friend Island,” says Luca, twiddling an invisible moustache.

By the end of the second episode the Italian Stallion has stolen the heart of Gemma. Which is convenient, because she teaches horses how to dance. Perhaps in time she will teach Davide to strut his hunky hooves. This leaves Liam, the raisin-existentialist, uncoupled and potentially facing eviction—just as I will surely face eviction when the hunks depart at summer’s end. Cough. Cough.