THE REALITY TV show Love Island is making an impression on Irish viewers – particularly among young women.

If you haven’t watched an episode, it’s difficult to explain – here’s Wikipedia’s attempt, which is the best of the lot:

“Love Island involves a group of contestants, referred to as Islanders, living in isolation from the outside world in a villa in Mallorca, constantly under video surveillance.

“To survive in the villa the Islanders must be coupled up with another Islander, whether it be for love, friendship or money, as the overall winning couple receives £50,000.”

At the end of the show, the public’s preferred person of the winning couple must choose whether to share their winnings with their partner, or keep the money for themselves.

“On the first day, the Islanders couple up for the first time based on first impressions, but over the duration of the series they are forced to ‘re-couple’ where they can choose to remain in their current couple or swap and change.”

The show puts couples through a series of challenges to test their mettle, and in a select few episodes it asks the public to vote for their favourite couple.

There’s a one-hour episode every evening at 9pm apart from Saturdays. This is the fourth season, which will run for at least eight weeks; last year’s season was extended by a week due to the popularity of the show.

This week, TV3 released figures on the number of viewers the show has accumulated after five weeks in, which makes for interesting reading.

Love Island is delivering on average 136,000 viewers per episode and commanding a share of 11%. An average of 22% of the 15-44 cohort are watching this season, with an average of 31% of women aged 15-34 watching and 26% of women aged 25-44.

This week the viewing figures broke records for the show.

Monday and Tuesday’s episodes delivered over 200,000 viewers on average and achieved record shares for the show.

Tuesday’s episode was delayed by an hour due to the World Cup quarter final between England and Colombia going into extra time and then penalties.

On Wednesday night, over 45% of all women 15-34 who were watching TV watched Love Island -  a significant statistic considering the competition between many different TV stations.

There’s also been over 4.6 million streams across live 3player and catch-up services.

This data was collected by Nielsen Television Audience Measurement, who have been providing a televisions ratings measurement service in Ireland since 1996.

The figures above are based on surveys done on homes from 1,050 homes, or around 2,500 people.