Dr Alex George is teaching me how to smoulder. Or, as he puts it, adopting a cod Sean Connery accent, how to “schmoulder”. It is, he explains, a way of attracting attention from possible romantic interest from afar.

“You have to sort of squint into the mid-distance,” he says, narrowing his eyes as if he’s trying to spot a motorway services sign off the M25. “And then it’s about not really focusing on anything.”

The art of schmouldering is one of the many life skills the 27-year-old Dr George recently picked up during his stint as a contestant on ITV2’s hit reality TV show, Love Island. He also learned new vocabulary, such as “peng sort”, which is colloquial slang for “a seriously attractive person”.

“And crepes!” he says, enthusiastically, sitting in his publicist’s office wearing a beautifully ironed white shirt and an appropriate amount of hair gel. “I always thought crepes were thin pancakes, but no – apparently it means ‘trainers’”

He looks at me with wide-eyed wonderment. If George sounds a bit like a mild-mannered 19th century explorer, parachuted into the Amazonian rainforest in order to study the exotic behaviours of a newly discovered tribe, then that’s because he sort of was.