Behind the scenes of Love Island series five – islanders reveal off-camera secrets you missed in the villa

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But with the show filming 24/7 for the past two months, there’s plenty of behind-the-scenes action that didn’t even make the cut for Unseen Bits.

From dinner to doing bits in the bedroom, here’s all the behind-the-scenes gossip straight from the Islanders themselves...

Mealtimes

While we’ve seen favourites such as Ovie and Chris cook up breakfast for the villa, Islanders famously eat lunch and dinner away from the prying eyes of the camera.

Amy revealed how the lunches and dinners the Islanders enjoy are provided in a buffet, with pasta dishes, curry, rice and potatoes on offer most nights.

But producers are mindful of how much our Islanders consume, with eating and drinking monitored. Alcohol is also under surveillance, which is why we only see our hopefuls having one or two glasses of wine in the garden instead of necking whole bottles.

Dinnertime is where a lot of flirty banter between contestants can take place off-camera, with Chris explaining that Jordan’s seemingly random affection for India wasn't so surprising to Islanders.

“We’re not allowed to talk about the show, but we can talk about whatever else we want. In those moments, there’s lots of flirting going on,” he explained.

“During food times Jordan would shout out: 'I'm going to be a vegan now' because India is a vegan,” Anna scoffed.

In addition to mealtimes, Islanders are also allowed to request food for the pantry in the villa kitchen, with Jourdan revealing that eggs and cheese are the most eaten foods.

According to Francesca, the most sought-after snack in the villa is a pack of chocolate chip cookies – which were at the centre of some of the villa’s biggest rows.

“Everyone goes crazy for these chocolate chip cookies when they come in,” she said. “People fight over it. There’s only eight cookies in the pack so there was 12 of us fighting over cookies.”

However Tommy’s favourite condiment was the humble mayonnaise with the boxer going through around a bottle a day, according to Michael.

“I told him he needed to stop because he was going to do some damage,” he added.

But every now and then, Islanders were allowed a real treat, with pizza or McDonalds being brought in to enjoy – which would explain why some fans spotted an errant McFlurry carton on the kitchen counter earlier this year.

“It’s only once every seven or eight days,” Danny said. “We would have got told off for leaving that McFlurry out.”

Downtime

Love Island series three winner Kem Cetinay previously explained that the Islanders got one day off filming a week to go to the beach without mics and just generally let their hair down.

This doesn’t seem to be the case two years on, with Danny explaining the Islanders have to be kept mic’ed up at all times – but that they did have an occasional day where they had time off.

“You can’t talk about what’s going on in the villa, you can talk about family and that kind of stuff,” Danny said. “On these days, haircuts would be done and any broken nails would get fixed.”

Michael added that just to ensure any cracking on was kept on camera, boys and girls would be split up during their downtime.

“No chats would be allowed to take place between guys and girls and we’d be kept separate,” he said. “The guys would stay in the garden and the girls would go to the bedroom or the dressing room. When it’s a ‘day off’, it’s not really. You’re still there, you’re there 24 hours a day.”

However, one Islander did have the opportunity to leave the villa; Anton spent a night away from the action after he fell ill.

“I'd had a little bit of fever so I went to the medic and they wanted to send me to the hospital to double check everything. It turned out that I was a little bit dehydrated,” he said.

"The problem was I was training in the heat and was drinking quite a lot of coffee off my own back.

"I was a little bit dehydrated so overnight they had to rehydrate me through a drip. It gave me a chance to miss everyone.”

Getting ready

We’ve all seen the shots of Islanders getting ready for a big night of… sitting out in the garden, but the time they have to get their gladrags on can vary between two hours and just 20 minutes.

“We’re meant to have two hours from when dinner finishes," Amy explained, “But when there are 15 of you that have to shower, it’s very rarely the case. If you’re number one in the shower queue, then yeah, you have two hours.

“We’re not allotted a number, it’s whoever shouts what number first.”

And while we saw the Islanders exit the villa with those big labelled suitcases full of clothes, fresh deliveries would come weekly from show sponsor I Saw It First to make sure all their outfits were villa fresh.

Islanders also shared clothes, with Michael admitting he left a lot behind for Tommy when he was dumped from the villa.

“I keep looking for jackets, before realising Tommy had them,” he laughed. “ I pretty much dressed Tommy the whole time.”

Ovie was best known in the villa for his slick style, with Michael adding he has 40 hats in total but only brought six into the villa – including a top hat!

The girls also brought substantial amounts of make-up to match their ever-tanning skin, with Yewande leaving behind her foundation for Amber to use.

Friendship, fighting and gossip

It has previously been reported that gentle giant Ovie fell out with the other boys after Casa Amor, as he felt Amber had been treated badly.

However, Jourdan said reports of the row were massively overblown. “It wasn’t that deep, it was just a tense environment,” she said. “Things were heightened after that recoupling.”

While we’ve seen our fair share of fights and fall-outs, the Islanders said it was a fairly happy villa with many nodding to Curtis, Anton and Belle as the most welcoming contestants.

“You missed us all singing together!” Amy said. “I wrote songs every single day in the villa, but they never showed them. I wrote a whole song about how I’d eaten a load of cheesecake.

“And they never showed us dancing! You saw Maura and Curtis dancing, but he taught me, Amber and Anna to dance in the two weeks.”

“You don’t see the bonds that people form,” Jourdan added. “There was a night on the beanbags with some of the Islanders, and we were laughing until we cried. These things aren’t aired enough, unfortunately.”

Bedtime

Several Islanders told us Michael is the worst snorer in the villa – something he refutes.

“Curtis is the loudest snorer, and he farts in his sleep,” he said.

Aside from the snoring, it’s a noisy affair in the villa bedroom, with Amber keeping the Islanders up all night – for all the wrong reasons.

“Amber talks in her sleep,” explained Francesca. “Really, properly talks. One night I was sharing a bed with her, and she was talking to me about bikinis and flare trousers and I was like what the hell is going on here?”

But the worst person to share a bed with? Yewande.

“Yewande would beat me up in her sleep,” said Michael. “She would kick me, hit me, and then in the morning, she’d wake up and be like, 'oh did that really hurt?' She’d be like, 'I didn’t think I really did that.' It’s all fun but you are beating me up.”

We’ve been left in the dark as to whether the Islanders had any sex in the villa, with Maura and Curtis, and Molly-Mae and Tommy’s antics leaving fans convinced that contestants were most definitely doing bits.

But it turns out the Islanders know as much as us about under the duvet action.

“I didn’t think anyone was!” Michael said. “We all talked about it, but you don’t think anyone’s having sex. But I saw an episode the other night, and I thought, I’m missing stuff here!”

RadioTimes.com spoke to Michael, Francesca, Amy, Danny and Jourdan at KISSTORY on the Common.

Love Island returns to ITV2 in 2020