Swigging porn star martinis is not what Cupid had in mind
Romance is dead. it’s doubly tragic to announce the news on Valentine’s Day, but the final nail — fashioned from one of his own redundant arrows — was hammered into cupid’s coffin by First Dates: Valentine’s Special (c4).
The recipe for love is no longer unique but something mass-produced, cobbled together according to a shabby formula. couples on this tired show, set in a London restaurant, chug past the camera like stale plates of food on telly’s conveyor belt.
Pairs of strangers are flung together, given a drink at the bar while we learn their names and ages, and then settle down to some awkward flirting over the dinner table.
But the couples don’t dine alone. The rule is that one of them must drag an ancient heartbreak along with them. if you’ve lost a parent, or a limb, the best time to mention it is between the starter and the main course.
azadeh, for instance, a 32-year-old from iran, was knocking back a sickly concoction she called ‘porn star martinis’ and teasing her date, computer geek olly, about his man-boobs.
suddenly she went all serious and sad, as she described how the love of her life had died four years ago from septicemia. olly swallowed hard, and said that sounded jolly upsetting, but life goes on and all that. azadeh perked up, and they scurried away in the rain.
ah, a happy ending. not for the dead bloke, obviously — he just gets to be a downbeat anecdote on a reality show.
most of the encounters feel heavily scripted. ‘Do i know you?’ asked anna, a mother-of-two from manchester, as she met 43-year-old comedian Vince. He didn’t think so, but she kept pushing, until Vince worked it out — they had dated briefly in the nineties, when she was 17.
Vince was dumbstruck. anna just looked grateful that the dozy lummox had finally cottoned on. The voice-over assured us that this was how cupid operated, with outrageous coincidences and bittersweet ironies.
But you could just as easily conclude that cupid is a bit of a stalker and might need a restraining order.
The formula demands that every episode of First Dates must have a gay couple and a duo of older lovebirds. The gays were German Gregor and scots Peter, and their tragedy was a corker: Gregor’s ex-husband had run off with a woman. Peter promised he’d never do anything so immoral, and the pair of them jumped in a taxi for soho.
steve and elaine, the couple in their 60s, had some very bad luck — the waiter brought them the bill. We don’t often see daters pay for food or drink on this show, much less worry about the prices, but here came that ominous silver platter with the leather booklet.
‘are we going Dutch?’ asked steve. it’s a reasonable question these days. Picking up the tab could seem openly sexist, the sort of anti-feminist hate crime that David Davis might inflict on Diane abbott. But it scuppered steve’s chances with elaine. it’s almost as if he were the subject of a stunt by the producers.
astonishingly, this wasn’t the worst matchmaking show of the night. Celebs Go Dating (e4) was even more staged, crass and toecurling . . . and it’s on every weeknight for the next month.
The so-called celebs were mostly refugees from manipulated reality series such as ToWie. The women have lips like bicycle inner tubes, and the men wear their hair slicked back with whale grease.
They were propelled into a roomful of uncelebs, or people who weren’t famous for appearing on vacuous TV shows.But here they all were, on a vacuous TV show, which raises an existential question: when does a member of the public graduate to celebdom?
Take stacey, who was wearing lurid blue lipstick that made her look like a corpse after a couple of porn star martinis. she snogged a tattooed ape from The only Way is essex, called stephen Bear.
is stacey a celeb now? is stephen a has-been or a never-was? either way, st Valentine is now the patron saint of nonentities.