Philosophically, we are all of us one of two people: those who would eat a worm, and those who would not. This is the only binary that exists. We are none of us defined by our age or our gender or our race or our religion: we are only, at a deep atomic core, people who would eat a worm (Wormies) and people who would not eat a worm (Worm–A–Nots). No other classification matters.

But equally: we would all eat a worm. I know that within the normal parameters of your life you would not eat a worm – you would prefer a BabyBel, wouldn’t you! You'd prefer not to just eat at all! – but under duress, under the exact right duress, everyone on the planet would eat a worm. Listen: the perfect level of duress, a constant eight weeks of duress, is being on Love Island (two outfit changes per day, exactly two drinks a night, absolutely no access to the news cycle, and every three days four hench blokes called "Lucas" keep walking into the house to either aggressively try it on with you or shake you by the hand so violently you think you might die, plus you are near-constantly sunburnt). By that principle alone, everyone on Love Island currently would eat a worm. This is just a fact.


And yet, as we have proven repeatedly since Sean Dyche went mad about worms that time, the sheer idea of whether someone would or would not eat a worm is actually a surprisingly consistent personality assessment. Try it on your next date, or at the next family function you're at: stare into the middle of the forehead of the person boring their way in front of you and think: would this person eat a worm? Most of them would. Look closer. They'd eat a worm, wouldn’t they? Look closer. Once you know the measure of a man – whether he would or would not eat a worm – then you know him by his very soul.

Anyway, in order of appearance:

AMY

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Who is Amy? Amy is an air hostess primarily made of teeth who has never had a boyfriend in her life. We have yet to see Amy sob under a shoulder blanket while being comforted on the daybed, but we will. We will see Amy sob a lot over the course of this summer. Amy is going to sob over between eight and 600 boys. Amy is going to sob perfectly – in that way where your body sob but your face stays serene, beauty in the sobbing, Amy touching one perfect porcelain finger to the corner of each eye and saying "sorry" to the thousands of girls amassed around her – Amy is going to sob over Anton, and then probably Tommy, and then a succession of lurking, shadowy boys, all of them currently in the gym now, shaving their pubes, preparing in bulk to fly over to Majorca and make her sob by having a 20-minute conversation with her ("You have nice eyes" "Do I really?" "Your eyes are insane"), go to the Diary Room about her ("Yeah we’ve got a connection") then see Lucie ("Listen, can I have a chat with you?") and fall in love with her instead.

But this isn’t about sobbing, it’s about worms. Would Amy eat a worm? Not normally, no. She doesn't want to eat one. Would Amy eat a worm if Tommy Fury was watching, distantly and emotionlessly, arms around Yewande near the fire pit? Yeah. Yeah she would.

AMBER

Photo: ITV

There is an alternate version of my life where I am like a "West End nightclub" guy – you can see it now, can't you: the black shirt, the waxed chest, the watch hire start-up money, the white jeans, the attempts at complicated handshakes with the door staff – and in this reality Amber has already ruined my life, in that I (in this scenario I am a confident go-getting lothario who regularly has full sex with women) have spent a whole evening with my bois (in this scenario I have two friends, both sort of puppy-like Jamie Laing analogues, and I call them my "bois") whispering in the corner about how this girl (Amber) is eyeing me up bro, swear down she’s looking at me, and finally I pluck up enough courage to walk over there (I have been to the bathroom first to re-apply my aftershave, which they actually have in the bathroom here, is how much of a West End club guy I am) and I go over to Amber and say either "hey" or "hey babe", and what Amber does is, wordlessly, gives me a look that is so cutting and debasing that my penis immediately shrinks by a quarter and never comes back out again.

Would Amber eat a worm? Would she fuck. She’d look at it until it fucking disintegrated, then vow to kill everyone who made every decision that led up to a worm being put in front of her and her being asked to eat it.

ANNA

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Hard to care, isn't it? Who fucking cares. Would Anna eat a worm? I don't know. Would she get a free trip to Dubai out of it? Then yeah probably.

YEWANDE

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Yet to see the best of Yewande, because she spent the majority of last night’s episode determinedly not stepping forward for anyone and sort of begrudgingly getting coupled up with Michael (the answer to the question: "What if we resized Callum Weekender in Photoshop?") – but the overwhelming worm vibe I'm getting from her is that she would stand in front of the whole house during a blazing hot sunny day and explain for like ten entire minutes how it is safe to eat a worm ("It’s actually a good source of protein"). She has a whiteboard for some reason, nobody knows how she got a whiteboard, and just before Sherif – who’s had his hand up, craning it in the air like a keen Year 2, making those special little "ooh, ooh! Me, me!" sounds of a child desperate to be noticed – just as a Sherif is about to ask, like, "What’s a worm then?" she turns and very neatly, very quietly, consumes it in one. Lesson over.

LUCIE

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Lucie would do absolutely fucking anything if it meant that Primark will print a T-shirt that says "BEV" on it. She would eat a worm without question.

"Fwoof it in, then bev the worm up with your gnashers" – Lucie, probably. I hate her.

ANTON

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Got Anton wrong, initially. When he walked in – stiff backed, made of beef, repeating that exact one anecdote he has ("My mum shaves my bum"), saying the word "girls" with somehow 15, 16 syllables in it, I thought: 'Ah. Another empty-headed lad who doesn’t know where to get his eyebrows done.' First out the door. I assumed: Anton is a man who will never eat a worm. But then I saw him pull one of the more baffling night-one power moves ever played on the game – asking Joe if he can shark Lucie, then going and talking to Lucie, and absolutely failing with Lucie, news that immediately got back to his coupled up girl, Amy – and I realised: ah. We have a Machiavellian power shagger on our hands. And that changes everything.

Anton, therefore, is now the entire fabric of the house. Every reality TV show needs "someone evil, or at least someone with an evil-leaning agenda, to cause chaos". Anton is not that. Anton is, very simply, not smart enough to pull any power moves within the complicated and delicate government of the house. However: he is exactly motivated enough, and exactly dumb enough, to keep trying to start shit just for the sake of starting shit, and for that reason he is vital. In three weeks he will have been soundly evicted after three separate girls all decide to splash him with wine at the same time, and he will retire to a heady summer of touring every Pryzm in the country for an appearance fee and a succession of foursomes, but right now, Anton is the heart that pumps the blood around the house. And right now: he would eat a worm if it meant he got one over on Joe. "Oh, was that your worm?" Anton says (Anton just put one-thousand syllables into the word ‘"worm"). "Were you saving that worm for Lucie? Oh." He pauses. "I didn’t know."

He knew. He always knows. See you at Pryzm, mate.

SHERIF

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Sherif is a context-dependent worm eater: he has a background in competitive rugby, and rugby boys would put almost anything in their mouth if it could legally be classified as banter, or it in any way intimidated a table of nearby girls. That said, isolate Sherif with just his yellow shirt and his Instagram login and he would not eat a worm unaided; ask Sherif to eat a worm to prove his love for Joe, already the true bromance of the series, and he would do it in a heartbeat. He’d do it before you even finished asking the question. "Sherif, would yo— "EAT A WORM TO DECLARE MY LOVE FOR JOE? ALREADY FINISHED IT, MATE."

MICHAEL

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No way Michael would eat a worm, and in fact him and his firefighter mates would kick the shit out of me just for asking. Just for thinking about asking. Michael, in a tight polo shirt and white jeans, sprinting in loafers down a Liverpool backstreet as the sun sets gauzy behind us, 100 separate and even hencher men in tow, me panting and dying and turning pink in the clatter: "Ey! He said he wants me to eat worms!" No. I’m never getting up from that. Pull the cord out of the coma machine I inevitably end up in. I don’t want to live in the shape Michael will leave me.

JOE

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Joe’s fun, isn’t he. He'd eat a worm. "Pop it in a baguette, worm worm worm!" Yeah, he'd make some fun out of it. Do a little song or something. "Worm me up, baby!"Holding one up to his ear and going: "Looks like my hair, don’t it!" Your mum and sister have both gone very quiet watching the TV. What's going on.

CALLUM

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Callum – and I didn’t know this was possible – is a kind of sauceless version of Pink Alex from last year, in that he's a stuttering Welsh loser who can't talk to women (and, I am also 90 percent convinced, a medically certified virgin), but also very crucially is lacking that intrinsic, love-him-or-hate-him gentleman loser complex that Alex had last year, so-much-so that Callum – deliberately cast in the Alex role! – could never even be this year's Alex. Anyway: I think I could make him eat a worm. You can tell adults who have some leftover trauma from Year 8, and he's one of them. And I could make every single one of those adults eat a worm.

CURTIS

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Going to be a lot of footage of Curtis this year saying stuff to a group of girls who pretend they don’t quite hear him. Going to be a lot of that. He’d eat a worm.

TOMMY

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Don’t know exactly how a romantic and sexual relationship between myself and Tommy Fury would work out, but ever since he walked in last night I’ve been wondering about it. Walking through town centres hand-in-hand. Both go look round JD Sports for ages. "Nando’s?" "Nando’s." Just a sort of wordless respect thing more than anything. Curry on the sofa Sunday nights. Long drives in new cars. I’ll take all the sponcon fitpics of him wearing a tracksuit and looking down on a newly pressure-washed patio. "That photo looks really good, mate," Tommy says (he calls he mate). "I'll put than on Instagram, that." Roughly, he kisses me thank you.