TV Review Greg Dixon
A new reality series about people’s lonely search for love has a touch of the peeping tom about it.
Ithink it was the great US philosopher, actress and model Jenny McCarthy who said that when it came to dating, it was best to just fart right away. Humiliation, this peerless guru of romance was possibly trying to tell us, is one of the common currencies of, ahem, the lonely search for love. In other words, when one is dating, one must sometimes leave one’s dignity at the door.
As it happens, humiliation and the loss of dignity are also the hard currency of reality television.
The embarrassment of participants by reality TV shows, or reality TV show participants embarrassing themselves, is both ubiquitous and a regular ratings winner.
Which is why something like TVNZ 2’s First Dates NZ – a new reality series in which single people go on blind dates while we watch – is something like a match made in heaven. Or, as I like to call it, hell.
The set-up is this: each week, the First Dates’ makers match up, through shadowy means, eight people who then meet for the first time at a flash Auckland restaurant on four blind dates that are filmed, the voiceover announces, by “discreet cameras searching out all the ups and downs”.
Ihave no idea why anybody would volunteer for this sort of thing. True, I have not been single for close to 30 years. But I’d have thought that people hoping to meet “The One” would want to avoid the added stress of having an audience, let alone a TV audience, looking over their shoulders, however “discreetly”.
And it’s not as if First Dates is some sort of dippy game show, a silly elimination process like the one we greying viewers remember in TVNZ’s late 80s Blind Date, with contestants asking and answering such headscratchers as, “How would women get on if men weren’t around?”
No, First Dates is more like Tinder
TV. This is people who don’t know each other connecting through an app called television, then, over a wine or three, trying to, well, get it on while we watch. This is intimacy, with all its vulnerabilities, delivered up for our entertainment. Is TVNZ trying to make voyeurs of us all?
Certainly there was a touch of the peeping tom in the way the cameras peered around metaphorical curtains and from behind pot plants. But what we saw and heard was thankfully PGrated, and the entertainment heavily dependent on the conversation-making abilities of the eight people who’d agreed to be spied on.
Some were amazingly sweet: the older couple, 58-year-old beauty therapist Elaine and 59-year-old musician Andrew, gently giggled their way through dinner and getting to know each other after she’d broken the ice by blurting, “Do you like dogs? I thought I’d either go on a date or get a dog.”
There were compliments: after a few Canadian Clubs, young Nikos, a drainlayer, told 19-year-old Cayla, a labourer, that “you’ve got really good table manners”.
There were jokes: when Johnny arrived and noticed Nicole at the bar with a crutch (she gone over on her heels the Friday before), he’d “done a quick scan to see if she had, like, two legs”.
And then there was Eugene, a Scotsman with bad teeth, a moustache and too many tattoos, who toyed with his date, Molly, all evening before letting her pay. He claimed he’d forgotten his card. Later, outside the restaurant, he laughed and produced his card for the camera. What a shit.
So, what are we to make of this? Well, despite its inherent voyeurism, First Dates is – against the nauseating sexism of The Bachelor and the stunt TV of Married at First Sight – harmless and relatable enough. But to be honest, I can’t see it working out between us. FIRST DATES NZ, TVNZ 2, Monday, 8.30pm.
Against the nauseating sexism of The Bachelor, First Dates NZ is harmless enough.