There’s enough whirlwind romance on TV these days to make any single person like myself instinctively run to the toilet to puke our guts out, and perhaps just leave our heads there in perpetuity after the heaves have gone dry. Like our pants.
Take C4’s date-’em-up First Dates for example. First Dates takes place in the same universe as Richard Curtis’ filmography, where everyone who enters the restaurant is either 1. an unbelievably attractive human with a heart-rending sob story, or 2. an oddball (but still acceptable within the bounds of polite society) with a heart of gold attempting to overcome their slight abnormality to win love and affection. The daters are all treated like a king or queen by a Clooney-esque maître d’ and his beautiful waiting staff, who have all come straight out of a Disney film and look far too happy and unaddicted to cocaine to be real restaurant employees.
With all the talk of how people are affected by ‘unrealistic standards of beauty’ recently, the success rate of transforming blind dates into guffawing lovely-dovey couples on First Dates is basically inhumane. Every episode contains about six dates, and at least two or three go on to see each other further. For real life people with stresses, time restraints and encroaching baldness/crow’s feet, struggling to find any fellow humans to share in soppy romantic encounters with, this comes across as almost intentional propaganda by First Dates’ advertisers.
Far from the enchanting love-fest it’s advertised as, the show feels designed to make you feel unattractive and below your peers – so that you’ll be more willing to buy the steady stream of beauty products, social media apps and home fitness malarkey that’s thrown in your face by new media shitheads and their dizzyingly over-produced marketing campaigns.
Even when dates don’t end up in a full-blown relationship by the end of the night, the contestants are so sickeningly upbeat about their searches for love, and their journeys are wrapped up in enough tinkly piano music and low fairy lighting to make you want to adopt them as your pet on the spot.
First Dates all adds up to an over-the-top, aspirational, saccharine bomb that’s destined to blow up in your singleton face and make you want to spend all your money to make the pain stop. That’s why it’s lucky that on the other side, there’s an antidote to all this sweetness – ITVBe’s Dinner Date.
Whereas First Dates is set in a swanky restaurant in central London – the world’s epicentre of aspirational bullshit – Dinner Date is set in a hovel in Zone 14, or even more frightening for upmarket corporate types, the North. In First Dates, contestants are lit by bedazzling studio lights at all times, given the once over by the best make-up artists in the realm, and pushed onto the old set of Love Actually. But in Dinner Date, contestants are essentially accosted by a rogue camera crew in their own homes, usually in the low light of early evening and after they’ve spent all day at work. Amidst the shiny hyper-reality of television, they look like they’ve strolled onto the screen straight from Bumfuck-on-Sea.
Dinner Date does a remarkable job of presenting the world of dating in its truest light. Contestants’ nerves, hopes and dreams are established by giving them time and space to dream up which of the Olympian gods could possibly be answering their knock at the door, before dashing those dreams against cold, suburban brick wall. Heady Hollywood aspirations are crushed beneath cringe-inducing small talk, as Dinner Date captures all the gory, uncomfortable ice-breaking conversation brilliantly. In much the same way as Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman captures the bleak, unedited reality of experiencing one’s life unfold, so Dinner Date tells its stories with stark, unapologetic economy (perhaps with slightly less artistic vision though).
The producers prod the contestants into hanging their own nooses, asking them leading questions off-camera to make them look like right tits in the final edit. It’s only encouraging – streamlining – the inevitable though, so while the words that come out of their mouth may be hyper-real, they reflect the reality of people’s desires and fears in the dating world. In First Dates meanwhile, the producers are encouraging positive words out of their subject’s mouths, leading to an assortment of cutesy and assinine rubbish which no real human could ever self-conciously utter.
One of my favourite elements of Dinner Date, which I truly resonate with, is how every contestant’s personality is slimmed down to just one crucial element, be it a hobby, a sport, or some disgusting bodily anomaly – a ‘thing’. In this cruel and impersonal world, we are very often defined just by one ‘thing’, usually our careers, forced to fit into a packaged stereotype lest we rebel and lose all financial security and social acceptance. It’s quite harrowing to think about, so it’s reassuring to have it presented on screen in a positive manner on Dinner Date.
The contestants who want to host the titular Dinner Dates are given just a few seconds at the start of the episode to show off their one defining feature, before two are chucked out on the strength of their menu alone by the person who will be attending the dates. It’s quite audacious for the person sitting around, being waited on hand and foot to judge the other contestants in this manner, but them’s the rules.
What I really worry about is this: where do the two contestants not selected to cook go for the rest of the episode? I like to imagine that they fall into some televisual Phantom Zone, imprisoned in a rhombus and forced to talk about their single character trait to General Zod and those other two for all eternity.
The lucky trio who do get selected to cook get to utter perhaps my favourite phrase in all of television. After they’ve whipped up their three course meal, but before their date has arrived, the producer asks the contestant off-camera to ‘say something like ‘so that’s the food prepped, now I’m going to get ready!” so that they can transition the show from the cooking bit to the dating bit.
The incredible variety of ways the contestants can interpret and innovate upon this perfunctory yet iconic line genuinely brings excitement to my sad little life. There are the boring contestants who just perform the line flat, as the producer fed it to them. There are the peppy ones who add happy inflections like ‘time for me to go get ready!’ There are the incredibly anxious ones who can barely stumble through the line. And then there are the hi-larious ones who bring the laughs like ‘I’m gonna try to make myself look presentable – don’t hold out any hopes!’ Every single contestant brings an exciting new spin to this pivotal moment in the show, making even the most functional moments of Dinner Date an edge-of-your-seat thriller. I love it so much, I made a song about it.
The dates themselves are cringe-worthy fare, and again it’s comforting to see real depressing people sitting in their real depressing homes, making vain attempts at genuine human connection. It makes me feel less like a social outcast, knowing that even people who may outwardly appear to be doing better than me are still going through the same issues in answering the existential question of ‘how do I relate to others?’ Far better to peer at than the First Daters, who appear to have long since answered the existential questions and have asceneded to a spirtual nirvana where actual, sincere happiness is potentially attainable.
For me though, the dates are usually a little too over-produced, scraping around the bottom of the bucket for the outrageous one-liner highlights of conversation, and don’t really get into the nitty-gritty of the inherently awkward first date situation. I tend to glaze over during the dates, though that may just be my sedentiary lifestyle catching up to me at a worryingly young age. No, it’s the bits around the dates – the hopes, the dreams, the repositioning of goal posts after the date – that I latch onto.
And of course, once all the dinner dates are over, the guest gets to pick which host they want to take out on a second date at, as the show states, a “Top Restaurant”. What the restaurant is ‘top’ of is never expounded upon, but it could be anything from ‘The Observer Food Monthly Awards’ to the ‘Food Standards Agency Biggest Health Risks’. It doesn’t matter too much, we’re not interested in how the second date goes so much as if the couple end up seeing each other again.
The ‘…one month later’ ending card is perhaps Dinner Date’s most famous feature, and one of the few examples of a television show deliberately deciding to make full episodes completely obsolete before they’ve even ended. Your decision to spend an hour of your life (45 minutes if you pause and start the show later to fast forward through the ads, like a normal person) watching Dinner Date is, >90% of the time, completely shat upon by the harshest words in TV – “they didn’t see each other again… [blank] is still single”.
It’s a visceral gut punch of a sentence to end a teatime folly on, but again, it’s comforting in its misery – a reminder that even if you’re feeling crap about yourself and your life, there’s someone else out there who’s also feeling the pangs of rejection and regret. And they’re single. It says so right there, on TV. Maybe they’d like to go for a drink with you?
Scrunched Disconsolately 