Not even Cilla’s best mate can rekindle Blind Date’s magic
Poor old Cupid. The cherubic god of love has been made redundant by the mobile phone. Who needs a quiver of heartshaped arrows, when singletons can download an app that pinpoints the location of hundreds of eager potential lovers?
Youngsters today can flick through more potential dates in five minutes than the most dedicated Lothario could have encountered in a year, just a generation ago.
Picking a partner by phone app must be about as emotional as browsing a Chinese takeaway menu. And, let’s face it, the age of romance is deader than the poultry in a chicken chow mein.
So the decision to revive Blind Date (C5) is as relevant as a campaign to reinvent the fax machine. What’s the point now of giving a girl three questions to put to three hopeful romeos hidden behind a screen?
In the time it takes to say, ‘What’s your name, Number one, and where do you come from?’ she could Google a hundred like them.
When the show was launched in 1985, it felt racy and modern — that’s why London Weekend TV bosses chose the old-fashioned and mumsy singing star of the Sixties, Cilla Black, to host it. She softened its brashness.
New host Paul o’Grady was Cilla’s best mate — he claims that she left him the show in her will when she died two years ago — but o’Grady’s acerbic style simply emphasises what a tawdry format this is.
He added a few dirty gags that Cilla would never have said, including one about ping pong balls that she probably would not even have understood.
Channel 5 made a great fuss about relaunching this former Saturday-night juggernaut, but they don’t believe in it enough to spend any money.
The set was decorated with 60-watt light bulbs that flashed on and off, and o’Grady had to keep apologising for the way that the sliding screen didn’t slide.
Because this was the first of the series, there were no dates already under way. To fill that gap, the show’s researchers had bundled two pairs of strangers off for lunch in Paris and Barcelona. Both couples came back wholly underwhelmed with each other.
That was a let-down. We want to believe Blind Date can at least kindle a spark of attraction. The producers should have persisted until they found a duo who actually liked each other.
But have they now run out of money for plane tickets? This week’s dates might be a game of table tennis and a round of mini-golf.
The real wooing of the weekend happened on a Cornish beach in Poldark (BBC1), where rough-hewn mining lad Drake (Harry richardson) romanced naive governess Morwenna (Ellise Chappell) beside a sacred rockpool in a cave. Then he gave her a bracelet made from sea shells. That’s how you did it before phone apps.
Now that star Aidan Turner is too important to strip off and scythe his own meadows, it’s Drake’s job to supply the show’s beefcake.
He took a naked bath in a stream, which caused burly wench Prudie to start panting about ‘needs a body might have’, and then went swimming in the sea with his brother.
Common he might be, but Drake is a very clean boy. Morwenna could do worse.
This season of Poldark is as rollickingly good as ever — all suppressed passion, bubbling Cornish feuds and those roiling Atlantic breakers.
It never goes anywhere, but it does it on horseback on a cliff edge. What more do you want?