What is it? Awkward recriminations over a restaurant table.
Why you’ll love it: Another horribly moreish commission from BBC3, Eating With My Ex dishes up eight seven-minute documentary vignettes, each featuring a former couple who meet for a meal to dissect old passions. Click on one as a starter and you will stay for the full tasting menu.
The format is reminiscent of Channel 4’s First Dates, but rather than switching focus between the couples during a longer episode, these snack-sized tasters allow you to eavesdrop on one pair to speed-digest the entire story of their relationship in a single gulp. It is like one delicious oyster after another. If you are the kind of person who gradually lowers your restaurant conversation to earwig on the obvious breakup happening at the next table, you will love this show but also be furious that only 56 minutes of it is available to watch.
Obviously, participants who answer an ad for a TV show that will reunite them with their ex come with an agenda, so the drama arrives readymade. But this isn’t a shouty recrimination bonanza in the mode of Jeremy Kyle. It is young folks, poking nervously at their lentil curry, and shyly attempting eye contact with someone who, often, has had a profound effect on them. Some want a reunion, others want an apology or just simple closure, the severing of an elastic band that pings them back to the bad situation to make the same mistakes again.
To move the conversation along, each course (there is only time for main and pudding) arrives on a plate with a leading question printed around the edge. “Why are you polyamorous now?” asks one. “Why did you cheat on me?” says another. I’ve picked the two most tabloid-sounding queries, but the resulting conversation is anything but. The answers are laced with regret, sometimes a twinkling eye over the rim of a fiddled-with wine glass or a micro-expression that leaks the inner tempest.
“I could tell you the day you slept with someone. It was on a Tuesday,” says Kris to her ex-girlfriend, Luka, three years after the fact. Every word is loaded with meaning as she goes on to explain that she is happy in the three years she has remained single since their separation. She’s fine.
Sarah was scarred in an accident and met male model Bogdan soon after. The scar on her chin is something she is coming to terms with. He told her it was beautiful. She wants him, and what he represents, back. That one is a tough watch but no one leaves the table any worse off for the experience.
Not every interface has a romantic undertone, sometimes it’s just two old friends wanting to put away the past and embrace their platonic future.
This is not the shrill slanging-match you might expect, but rather a series of discreet firework displays over a dinner table; short plays about young love, very nicely directed by Paddy Hughes. I’d like seconds, please.
Where: BBC3 on iPlayer.
Length: Eight seven-minute episodes, available to stream now.
Standout episode: Episode four, with Faye and Sade, features the biggest surprise and unexpectedly choked me up.
If you liked Eating With My Ex, watch: First Dates (All4), Crazy Ex Girlfriend (Netflix).
