The reality matchmaking franchise First Dates has now emigrated to Australia, and something has been lost in translation. The original featured a lot of awkward encounters and ill-advised strategising, but it had an essential core of warmth. The Australian version, First Dates Abroad (E4), has a sliver of ice in its heart. Where the former was unexpectedly sweet, this one is a little bit pitiless.
The format, at least, is identical: a restaurant plays host to a number of blind dates, and hidden cameras pick up every excruciating moment. At the end, you find out if the prospective couple would like to go on a second date, provided you still care. International model Aiden, 29, was set up with beautiful Emily. International bellend Chris was paired with Caterina, who said a lot of her friends were gay. Chris turned out to be an eye-contact freak – a starer, really – who believed himself to be in possession of a range of alluring facial expressions.
Chris had clearly read somewhere that a man should never talk about himself on first dates, but the second time someone asks you what you do for a living, I think you’re supposed to answer. At times, Chris seemed to have lifted his personality traits straight from the psychopath’s checklist (“I reckon each friend would describe me completely differently”), but Caterina seemed to like him anyway.
A man called Nicholas Nicholas said: “I liken myself to an excitable puppy – I’m loving, I’m endearing, but like most puppies, I end up pissing [on] the floor.” He seemed nervous enough that you had to consider the possibility the date might conclude this way. When the bartender asked him what he wanted beforehand, he said: “I’ll start off with something light, like a tequila shot.” They do things a bit differently in Australia.
To be fair to Nicholas Nicholas, he was too nervous to drink the tequila. He was so nervous that he forgot his date’s name. He was so nervous that I forgot his date’s name. Fortunately, I’d written it down so I would remember how many “I”s there were in Dannii. Sensing it was going badly, Nick nipped to the loos to phone a friend for a failsafe pickup line, forgetting perhaps that you don’t need to pick someone up if they’ve already agreed to have dinner with you. His mate offered: “Are you a magician? Cos when I look at you, everyone else disappears.” “Aw, that’s actually really nice,” said Nicholas. Mysteriously, Dannii seemed to think so too.
At another table, Lauren was summing herself up for Corbin. “I’m not the crazy,” she said, “I’m the opposite of the crazy,” before going on to give an unconvincing portrayal of a sane person. “I’m a unicorn,” she said, by which I think she meant that she was such a rare woman, so uncrazy and not at all controlling and never, ever jealous, that men try to corral her – “stage five clingers”, she called them – but she just flies away. Other interpretations are welcome.
Viewers were left with one horse to back: Tom and Vanessa. They were small-town kids, both shy, guileless, hearts very much on sleeves. Their encounter was the only one with an authentic ring to it. They were transparently and mutually smitten, and the sliver of ice in my heart briefly melted.
Caterina wanted more of Chris’s creepy eye contact. Lauren thought Corbin had “boyfriend potential”, but Corbin thought better of it. “I definitely believe in the fairytale ending,” said Lauren. “I’d rather be alone and keep doing my thing and hope that Mr Right finds me.” When it comes to First Dates Abroad, believers in the fairytale ending should probably look elsewhere.
The Secret Life of Kittens (C5) didn’t do a lot to convince me that kittens have much in the way of a secret life. They spend their first week being blind and deaf and rolling about, displaying little in the way of hidden depths. They are cute, but that’s famous. I don’t think I learned a single mysterious thing about kittens or their day-to-day business. I like cats, and I’m as susceptible as the next man to images of sleeping kittens piled on top of one another in a cat hammock, but the relentlessly twee narration (play fights were “tabby tussles”, followed by a “quick catnap to recharge kitty batteries”) left me in a mood to drown a sackful of them. I found myself wondering how much you would have to hate football to sit all the way through it. But maybe I was missing the point. Maybe it was actually aimed at cats.
