When Blind Date returns on Saturday, it will find itself surrounded by swarms of its bastard progeny; a clutch of dating shows that have scraped its baseline DNA and used it to form all manner of warped hybrids. Take Me Out. First Dates. Love Island. That creepy Channel 4 thing where people are forced to have it off in a massive coffin.
The danger is that, in this new dating show landscape, Blind Date simply won’t be able to keep up. There’s a chance it’ll look old fashioned and fuddy-duddy in comparison. Here are the obstacles Blind Date needs to scale if it’s going to be a success.
The personality factor
Blind Date’s raison d’etre is an understanding that true beauty is only skin deep. Contestants make assumptions about their potential partners based on their personalities and nothing else. They aren’t even allowed to see each other until after they’ve been paired up. This, we now know, is madness. That’s not how people fall in love. Haven’t you seen Take Me Out? That’s literally just a row of women who reject men on sight if their trousers happen to be slightly too ostentatious. Plus, everyone has Tinder now, and Tinder – if I’ve got this right – is mainly about trying to find the sexiest person ever to take a sad selfie at the Berlin Holocaust memorial. How is Blind Date supposed to compete?
The scripted responses
If you ever rewatch any original Blind Date episodes, you’ll realise that the contestants are actually just picking partners based on their ability to memorise and repeat puns. A typical Blind Date question would be “I work as a florist, so tell me which flower you’d be and why”. The response, teed up beforehand, would be something like “I’d be a tulip because, darling, I’ve got two lips just for you”. Now, all dating show responses just have to be blunt declarations of sexual prowess. If the flower question happened on Take Me Out, the most successful response would be “I’M DEAD GOOD AT BLOWJOBS, ME” yelled as loudly as possible.
All the hat talk
Just to reinforce the notion that Blind Date was too courtly and coy for its own good, it had an alarming obsession with wedding hats. If a date went well, Cilla Black would shuffle forward to the edge of her sofa and ask “Do I need to buy a hat?” to the delight of the studio audience. While that might not continue in the new series – I’ll come to that in a moment – it did seem to overstate the importance of marriage as a sign of success. The current crop of dating shows are much less shy about what people really want, which is just endless heavy insinuations about them getting their ends away. Perhaps Blind Date should update its catchphrase to “Do I need to buy you some rubber johnnies?”
The lack of Cilla Black
Perhaps the biggest obstacle of all. To most people, Cilla Black was Blind Date. The thought of it continuing with someone else at the helm is repellant. Cilla bestrode Blind Date like a colossus; generous and charming, but with an undeniable hint of don’t-mess-with-me steel. However, the show might have found the perfect replacement in Paul O’Grady. He has the exact same mix of warmth and waspishness as Cilla, plus an enviable inability to conceal his true emotions. He can be a world-class sneerer, too – a good thing as far as Blind Date is concerned – and it’s hard to see him ever stooping low enough to attend anything as gauche as a wedding. Forget everything else – O’Grady’s haughtiness might be just the thing to save Blind Date.
Blind Date starts on Saturday at 7pm on Channel 5.
