The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
VICTORIA COREN MITCHELL HOW I SEE IT
Its format could hardly be simpler, but in these harsh times ‘First Dates’ feels like a love song to humanity
n my first date with my husband, I reached into my bag and pulled out about £600 in cash.
He wasn’t my husband then, of course. We’re old-fashioned but we’re not that old-fashioned. I was a single girl and a degenerate semiprofessional gambler, always carrying a passport and large bundle of notes. After all, a poker game could break out at any time. Perhaps not on a date – I would have drawn the line at that – but maybe afterwards? It’s not like we’d be going home together. I’m modern, but I’m not that modern.
Anyway, when the bill came, I offered to pay. I was quite insistent on the matter. This would not have required £600 (it was a meal in a pub, £28 would have done it), but I wanted him to believe I was sincere.
I wasn’t sincere. If he had accepted the offer, I’d have been horrified. Still, one has to make a show of these things.
It’s a dance, isn’t it? The bill comes; you offer to pay; they say no it’s on me; you say no no I can’t accept; they say no really I insist; you whip out £600 in cash and say it’s no problem I won this yesterday; they say you’re a bit weird aren’t you; you say if I weren’t weird I wouldn’t be single; they get out a credit card; you cave in; five years later you get married and live happily ever after.
However, I only let him pay because I liked him. If I hadn’t planned to see him again, I wouldn’t have taken the free meal. Wrong message, I’d have thought.
This is where I differ from two of the hopefuls on the opening episode of First Dates, a new series of which began on Channel Four this week. It is one of the worst things people do on this wonderful, wonderful programme: allow their date to pick up the tab and then tell them (invariably, tell him): “I’m not interested.”
Now, that isn’t cricket. The point is not for gentlemen to take care of the sweetmeats because ladies have no money of their own. Letting your date pay the bill is flirtatious. The implication is that you’ll see each other again and you’ll pay your share in the future. It’s an opportunity even to say that.
I know I’m a thousand years old and today’s singletons indicate enthusiasm on a first date by having an immediate shag behind some bins and then following each other on Instagram. I make no criticism of this, nor of going
Dutch as some prefer. But I do disapprove of letting a suitor buy your dinner when you’ve already decided to reject him. A sort of yummy appetiser before the bitter, salted pudding.
It seems especially cruel if the rejection is going to be made publicly in front of the nation. On Tuesday’s First Dates, this was done by a gorgeous blonde lawyer to an 18-year-old apprentice mechanic whose mother has Alzheimer’s and who’d never been on a date before. Jeez, let him keep his money at least.
She was actually a nice girl, though, the lawyer. They nearly always are on First Dates. That is one of the great things about this great show: the participants are usually lovely or, at worst, forgivable. Every week, the programme tricks you into dismissing or disliking someone before revealing a sudden pocket of vulnerability and kindness, repeatedly demonstrating the rewards of looking below the surface. In these harsh times, First
Dates is a love song to humanity.
It’s also cleverly shot, entertainingly edited and brilliantly cast. Like the early, compelling series of Big Brother, it features a wide range of ages, attitudes and sociological types, all behaving somehow as though they aren’t being observed, revealing themselves gradually like flowers. You know: like Big Brother before every contestant was 22, famehungry and as superficial as a silicon wafer.
Despite its success and longevity, First Dates hasn’t jumped the shark. Truly, the participants aren’t looking for celebrity; they’re looking for love.
It’s also a beautifully simple format to come along so late in the life of TV entertainment. Hopeful couples have dinner in a restaurant, getting to know each other. That’s it.
Compare this with Flirty Dancing, Channel Four’s other returning dating show. Same idea, only before having dinner each participant must train intensively with a group of dance tutors then meet their intended for the first time in a public place, exchange no words, launch immediately into a complicated, formal, silent dance routine, before leaving and travelling separately to a restaurant to see if they both turn up. It’s one of the oddest things
I’ve ever seen. It’s gripping for all the wrong reasons.
And of course they both turn up. Consider what they have already
Flirty Dancing, one of the oddest things I’ve seen, is gripping for all the wrong reasons