Love Island is TV fantasy, but it goes really well with crisps

Love Island, whose finale is tomorrow, has become the guilty pleasure of our time. “Is it wrong,” tweeted Michael Vaughan, the former England Test cricket captain, “that I am 42 years old and can’t stop watching #LoveIsland?!!!”

Whether it’s right or wrong, it’s hardly surprising. With dating now a Rubix Cube-style game of aligning upsides and downsides, quirks and compatibilities, the opportunity to watch other people (with perfect bodies and zero wrinkles) trying to solve the modern riddle of love is just too cathartic to miss.

This is not, of course, a new pasttime. Blind Date, which first aired in 1985, was an instant hit – partly because of Cilla’s crooning, crackling wit, but also because it showed us young singletons negotiating the awkward business of attraction, in real time, while we sat back and shoved in Maltesers and wine.

What was endearing about the likes of Blind Date was that the contestants were fairly normal; characterful but not beautiful. Much of the charm of Channel 4’s First Dates also comes from the fact that its romantic hopefuls are ordinary people – sometimes even boldly eccentric.

Love Island offers something of rather a different order. On one hand, it is the most in-depth picture of the mechanics of attachment we’ve ever had; a veritable laboratory of relationship dynamics. On the other hand, its contestants are wholly unrecognisable: a new species of Briton that has attained Hollywoodstyle physical perfection. Next to this crop of models, actors, personal trainers and hairdressers, we’re all dumpy hags. But that’s the fun of it. Love Island has given us the ultimate feelgood spectacle: a close-up of the messy dynamics of attraction, no matter how good-looking you are, twinned with a reassuring distance.

I, for one, am happy to let the six-packed blonds of the country negotiate the dog-eat-dog world of competitive romance while I sit home on the sofa, beer and crisps to hand.