Dinner Date review

TV likes love. Love is great. From ginger wall of teeth Cilla Black and the anonymous match-up fun of Blind Date, to the faintly horrific coliseum judgement vibe of Take Me Out, it seems ITV is on a quest to eliminate singledom from our fair land forever. One approach it takes is via the fringe time delights of Dinner Date. The premise of the show is fairly simple – to match singletons based on a love of good food. The issue with this is that it fails to take into account the problem that enjoying the taste of taramasalata does not compensate for the fact most of these people are such boring, depressing creatures that a future with any form of human contact, let alone one involving another creature spewing with affection, is but a tragic pipedream.

In tonight’s episode, we meet Natalie from London. A Psychology graduate and actress, Natalie resembles the kind of bland model you would find in a glamour magazine, but with the cold, dead eyes of a psychopath watching a  car crash. She has been alone for four months, that incredible period of time, and thinks she must get back on the dating wagon.

Most of these people are such boring, depressing creatures that a future with any form of human contact is but a tragic pipedream.

The first step is to whittle five contenders to three based solely on their menus. We, however, meet them – we have Paul (a gawky sex offender), Ben (slab of meat with a drawn-on face), Dan (Ross Kemp), John (a macho 12-year old Eric Idle) and Patrick (a chubby Snoop Dogg). Via some mental process I couldn’t fathom, she picks Paul, Dan and John.

Date one is with Paul, who showed his quirkiness with an Alice in Wonderland quote for no obvious reason – he was so depressing, narrating his lonely history over his tomato water soup. I didn’t like Paul – he seemed a bit of a loser, concealing his lack of personality with not very amusing jokes. Natalie seemed bemused to begin with, and then started taking the mickey out of him throughout dinner. He ended with the ugly trifle ever – like a dessert committed suicide – but by then, Natalie was too drunk to care.

On date two, we meet financial trader Dan, who described himself as caring, loving and loyal – a bit like a Spaniel then. However, before we softened too much, he demonstrated how tough he was by punching garlic apart and spouting proverbs like a wise arsehole. He went on for ages about his dining room table – supposedly from Nelson’s ship – and when Natalie arrived, he gave her a hammer to make her own drink. I really didn’t like him – at this point, I was willing Natalie to bludgeon him to death for the good of society. Instead, we got more facts spurted like a scumbag Cliff Clavin and such insidious, disgusting flirting that he made me skin crawl, the slimy cretin.

Our last potential suitor was John, a sports masseuse and all-round shy guy, who was desperate for any form of human conflict. When Natalie arrived, he nurtured her, catered for her every whim and kept sneaking glances like Annie Wilkes in her pre-cockadoody phase. Natalie was particularly excited at John’s menu, as he had promised a surprise – this transpired to be a psychic, who amazed her with predictions that she was not perhaps the luckiest in love and that she ought to try a different sort of man. To conclude the night, John provided Natalie with some homemade cakes, and then – I presume, based on his temperament – ran back upstairs to his bathroom for some John-time. Not that the cameras would show that.

The final part of this show has Natalie going over her dates, before picking a man to go to a meal ‘that they haven’t had to cook themselves’. The general rule here is that the person chosen is always the most attractive, thus removing any pretence that the show is about anything more than the primeval urge to mate. However, every character was so dull and bland that none of them seemed to constitute more than a bundle of organs with the sole purpose of turning oxygen into carbon dioxide with their wasted lungs. In the end, Natalie chose Paul, and they went out for another cringey laugh fest in which Natalie realised it was like talking to her father. Then, in our epilogue, we learn that the only person seeing anyone currently is Dan, proving some women will fall for dicks.

Every character was so dull and bland that none of them seemed to constitute more than a bundle of organs

Dinner Date does not claim to be anything that it is not, but what it is is so horrific that I find myself able to watch it out of a perverse fascination, in the same way I watched The Human Centipede 2 but with marginally less disgust. Still, I find it strangely enjoyable – I know it will make me angry and cause me to despair at the state of humanity, but as a piece of fluff to kill forty minutes, there are much worse ways to go. Indeed, there’s something for everyone – if you’re in a couple, this’ll make you feel much better. And if you’re single, this’ll make you realise that relationships aren’t that good. Maybe that’s the point – ITV has realised the quest for love has failed, and it broadcasts this show to numb the love centre of the brain until it dissolves into primordial ooze. Love may be a sham, but here’s a psuedo-cooking game show as consolation prize.