Dating shows have been the form of TV in which it has been hardest to make a lasting match. The long marriage between ITV and Cilla Black in Blind Date was pretty much a singleton, until it was recently joined in union with Take Me Out and First Dates.
But there’s a new suitor from tomorrow night in Meet the Parents, hosted by Holly Willoughby, who is being asked to go up against Strictly Come Dancing. As an idea, Meet the Parents marries Blind Date (studio contestant picks potential mate from three possibilities) with First Dates (the matched pair go on a meal in a restaurant customised by the TV company). But the twist is that there is an intermediary: it is three sets of parents, or sometimes other relatives, who answer questions from the hopeful romantic on behalf of the prospective dates. The folks also secretly watch the winners’ dinner from behind a screen.
It’s a shock this idea has not been tried before, though you strongly suspect it was dreamed up at a wedding. The grownups flirt inappropriately with the young chooser, and there is a wedding-speech feel to the sequences in which the adults bring up embarrassing childhood anecdotes or photos. During these moments, the trio of would-be dates, confined to a “den” in the corner, squeal or hide behind the sofa.
The movie Meet the Parents involves a family called the Fockers and, in the TV equivalent, the tension comes from how likely contestants are to end up focking. After their first dinner, the couple is sent to a photobooth, where physical interaction is encouraged. (A similar device is used in Channel 4’s most recent contribution The Lie Detective – in which contestants answer questions about love and sex while wired to a polygraph – by trapping couples in a lift with hidden cameras.)
In that respect, Meet the Parents and The Lie Detective could be sealed in a time capsule to show defining aspects of 21st-century life. Asked to read a question from a card – “What is your son’s best feature?”, or “If your penis were a movie title, what would it be?” – everyone always starts with the word “So”, although it surely isn’t written down. And tattoos are almost as ubiquitous as public displays of affection: presenters hug contestants, couples hold hands at all times, and other body parts at others.
This ease of talking about and displaying physicality marks the biggest shift in the 30 years from Blind Date to Meet the Parents. Dating shows have been relatively rare for two reasons. For years, broadcasters were nervous of any suggestion that they were encouraging the public to have sex. Cilla Black always claimed to have been told that her selection to present Blind Date was due to being so “sexless” as to be a fire-blanket on the show’s implications.
At the BBC, such inhibitions remain to the extent that, even many decades after the death of its severe Presbyterian founder Lord Reith, the BBC has scarcely ever flirted with hook-up shows, except for last year’s Sexy Beasts, a completely barking concept in which participants sniffed each other while disguised as creatures from nature or myth.
Commercial TV’s increasing liberation from regulation means that ITV and Channel 4 have enthusiastically embraced date-and-mate shows. Indeed, C4 currently has a body of work in this genre that stretches to a foursome, with First Dates and The Lie Detective joined by The Undateables (since 2012) and this summer’s Naked Attraction.
Naked Attraction, in which compatibility was judged from exposed flesh including genitals, showed how unzipped the genre has become since Cilla was employed to stop moral knickers twisting. But new ethical and moral concerns have arisen. The Undateables – a soul-mate show for those who have faced rejection for physical or psychological reasons – faced accusations of insensitivity.
However, any programme that sends strangers off together raises issues of duty of care: a number of matchups on Take Me Out have been abandoned after contestants misrepresented their identities or backgrounds. And in a culture marked by greater fluidity of sexual identity, the makeup of the dating pool becomes a serious question for producers.
Take Me Out, built on the idea of one man picking from several women, continues to promote a circa-1950s view of romance, although presenter Paddy McGuinness has expressed the desire to present a gay version. Meanwhile, First Dates and The Lie Detective have featured all of the relationships that could lead to marriage in modern Britain, although The Undateables remains contentiously separatist. In a move perhaps aiming to compensate for the singularity of Take Me Out, ITV tells me that an episode of Meet the Parents features a man choosing from three men.
With dating TV now so popular, the question, as in all relationships, is how far it might go. Commissioners will be desperate for new suggestions and, although most permutations have now been tried, there must be others.
The metaphor in Blind Date has already been made more literal in Dating in the Dark, where the people eating in a restaurant don’t know who they’re meeting until the lights go on. But perhaps Dating in the Dark could be given a Shakespearean twist in Masked Balls, with face-obscured contestants at a Venetian dance (bringing a useful slice of the Strictly Come Dancing vibe) not knowing until the end whether they are dancing with a man, woman or, if they go really Bardic, the twin from whom they were separated in a shipwreck.
With one segment of society still barred from marriage, how about Meet the Bishop, a matchmaking show for gay Church of England worshippers and clerics, in which the winning couple can live together but agree not to have sex?
And a burst of nostalgia for the 1960s might yet result in Car Keys, in which contestants throw their fobs in a bowl and have to get off with whoever’s they pick out, although the obvious sources of sponsorship and advertising – car manufacturers – might take some persuasion to see it as a vehicle for them.
Meet the Parents starts tomorrow at 7pm on ITV.
