Patrick Freyne: Love Island is a sanctuary for hunk-kind

There is an environmental disaster on the horizon: a devastating hunk shortage. And so the producers of Love Island (nightly, UTV Ireland) have fashioned a hunk sanctuary on a remote island to ensure a future for this delightful television-based species.

From behind one-way glass, white-coated naturalists and general-purpose voyeurs observe as various hunks and hunkettes are introduced to their new environment and encouraged to pair off and mate.

The future of hunk-kind is at stake and they wander around, shirtlessly frolicking and calling to each other across the wetlands (or, if you insist, “swimming pool”). “Skrrreeeeee!” they call. “Caaaaaw!” and “Looking hot ladies!” and “Can I have your number because I lost mine” (this is one hunk’s chat-up line). It’s a magnificent sight, particularly if you’ve never seen a hunk in the wild.

Presenter Caroline Flack, who has learned the ways of the hunk/hunkette, wanders amongst them like a hunk- focused Diane Fossey. She wears a floral playsuit like a toddler might wear and always looks slightly haunted. These two things are presumably unconnected. I think she’s just been to other Love Islands and has seen how things can go.

On the one hand, this attempt to jump-start the hunk population might fail and then we would have no more hunks. On the other hand, there's a possibility that the hunk breeding will go too well and that hunks will infest the mainland. There'll be hunks everywhere. You won't be able to move for hunks and hunkettes destroying the local flora and disrupting the food chain with protein shakes and botox. Then poor Caroline Flack will have to cull them, which she will do with the ruthless efficiency for which she is known, but with tears in her eyes, for she has learned to love the hunks. Creepy hunk All varieties of hunk and hunkette are here. I count some cheeky chappies; a needy hunk ("I think I'm fairly sexy, my nana's told me"); one extremely creepy hunk ("You're the most frigid bird I've ever met in my life," he tells one hunkette); and a taciturn hunk who "hates drama" which is unfortunate because everyone else loves drama.

My favourite is Tom, a very lumpy orange hunk, who looks a little like The Thing from the Fantastic Four (“You look like you’d be painful to cuddle,” observes circus-performing hunkette Cara). Like The Thing, he wears very small pants. When you scrunch up your eyes he look like a tiny blue triangle surrounded by a huge blurry orange triangle (FYI scrunching up my eyes is just a fun thing I enjoy doing).

The hunkettes arrive, bikini-clad and riding in the back of individual convertible jeeps. All of them, we learn, favour men who are “tall dark and handsome” and they are amazed by this coincidence.

They're an idiosyncratic bunch. Cara, at the age of 25, injects botulism into her forehead and has a pet snake (what a brave new world we live in). Sophie, at the age of 30, is considered to be quite old. In the context of Hunktopia she is a trusted elder and the younger hunkettes ask her for relationship advice and to recall her memories of the Blitz for a school project. Signal interest All of the hunkettes wade in the pool as various hunks come in to select a partner. The hunkettes must signal interest by stepping forward and then the hunk must choose one of them in a manner that is inevitably hurtful. Sometimes they disrupt a pre-existing partnership, much like hunks in the wild. Their people call this bit "the coupling".

The hunks then set about their elaborate mating rituals. They gather shirtless around the swimming pool. They repose in double beds in the communal bedroom which is fitted with a night-vision camera for *cough* totally legitimate scientific purposes.

By day two, things are going well. “All of the boys in the house have been getting kisses, one of them has had his willy touched,” says one of the hunkettes matter-of-factly.

There are power struggles, however. Initially there are six hunks for five hunkettes (to paraphrase that charming musical about bride abduction, Seven Brides for Seven Brother) and the hunks are wary of surplus unattached hunk, Javi. He and Daniel both circle around Olivia who cannot choose between them.

“Daniel is a dragon who is worn out and has thin skin and needs to be slayed,” says Javi, inaccurately.

Daniel is a bit more straightforward in his approach. “Skreeeeee!” he shrieks in warning, while production-staff in safari-suits arm their tranquilliser guns.

It’s all very exciting, though we all know how this is going to end. Olivia will select her mate and together they will fashion a nest from mud and twigs and tanning lotion and hair gel. Then she will brood over the hunk eggs while her chosen mate fetches her squirrels to eat.

Wait, am I thinking of hunks or hawks? Springwatch is back (Monday to Thursday, BBC2) and sometimes I get the programmes mixed up. "There we have two different males provisioning the same female at the same time at the same nest," observes Chris Packham of a Sparrowhawk love triangle, and possibly Olivia, Daniel and Javi.

Springwatch is great. They lure you in with fluffy baby owls or an adorable badger climbing a tree or some burrowing puffins and then they horrify you with a heron eating a live frog, or some screeching, featherless baby birds falling from a nest, or a golden eagle chick swallowing a crow baby or Chris Packham's quiff.

Springwatch is all about "nature", and "nature" it turns out, is basically what happens when you get David Lynch to remake a Disney film. And it's brilliant. Every night this week we got to watch the mighty resources of a public broadcaster trained on the beautiful, terrible everyday with four excitable anorak-wearing presenters who say amazing things like: "Bolstered by this amphibian feast, now he must pick a mate!" and "I like a bird with erectile nuptial plumes!" Both sentences I can also imagine appearing on Love Island, now that I think of it.