2017’s dating scene is a complicated and frightening place. There are apps for no-strings hook-ups. Apps based on special interests, or political leaning, or whether you like Slayer or not. There’s even a dating site exclusively for undertakers and taxidermists. Modern folk are busy, and this saves everyone time and money on unfulfilling dates.
Yet there was something thrilling about the old way of doing things. You’d arrange to meet someone and turn up, hoping with all your might that they did too. Blind dates were even more fraught: desperate attempts to convince your brittle self-esteem that you were stood up because of some calamity, not because they saw you, were appalled and left. This was the world of pre-mobile, pre-internet dating. A simpler time. And no TV show reflected this era of courtship innocence more perfectly than ITV’s matchmaking megahit Blind Date.
You know the set-up. “Our Graham” as the Master of Ceremonies. One dater asking three wannabe datees questions, all the while remaining unseen behind a retractable screen. After three questions were asked, a decision was made, the screen was removed, and the potential pair clapped eyes on each other for the first time, sometimes with visibly awkward consequences. Then the couple went somewhere nice for a date. Presiding over the whole thing was the inimitable Cilla Black, lovable high priestess of primetime pairing. Blind Date was responsible for three – yes, three – marriages, at each of which Cilla Black was a guest of honour. Running from 1985 to 2003, it was fun, occasionally cheeky and affably naff. And now, in the cold, dystopian wasteland of dating in 2017, it’s coming back.
Like dating itself, since it ended (after Cilla announced she was leaving live on air, unbeknownst to the producers, like an absolute queen), dating shows have evolved into unrecognisable mutants of the warm, sexless template laid out by Blind Date. They’ve ranged from the good (Take Me Out) to the bad (Love Island) to the impossibly sweet (First Dates) to, well, Naked Attraction, in which – in case you honestly don’t know – people choose to go on a date with someone based entirely on what their genitals look like. Only Take Me Out retains the lights-and-laughter format of Cilla’s progenitor, yet even this does so with an air of predatory cynicism, as a preening oaf descends the “love lift” to be assessed by 30 single women through the medium of shrieking and innuendo. Would Our Cilla approve? No she would not.
Dating shows won’t ever go away because there’s something undeniably alluring about watching others’ romantic failures. It’s harmless schadenfreude. Yet as formats grow tired, TV producers are frantically searching for the next in line at a time when audiences are both easily bored and totally unshockable. Beyond Naked Attraction, how much further can dating shows really go? There’s Sex Box, in which – in case you honestly don’t know – a couple retreat into a box to do the deed, before emerging to discuss it. But this isn’t dating, or relationships, or even smut.
The only feasible direction for dating shows to go in is reverse. Back to basics; to Blind Date – wooing free of cruelty or the lowest-common-denominator desire to shock or arouse. Dating in 2017 – all travelling selfies and unsolicited intimate photographs – needs Blind Date’s pre-watershed virtuousness more than ever. Dating shows: even more so. Not the “young, sexy and modern” Blind Date presented by D-list reality celebs that’s being promised, but the old one. The bad hairdos and bumbling awkwardness. The sweet and complete lack of ego. The warm, matronly encouragement that Cilla provided. At the risk of sounding a billion years old, we need a trip back to the old way of doing things.
