First Dates: The Proposal (C4) | 4OD
The Apprentice (BBC1) | iPlayer
The Bridge (BBC4) | iPlayer
Peep Show (C4) | 4OD
Imagine the loneliest thing in the world. Walking across a desert in the wake of a nuclear apocalypse that has extinguished the entire human race, for example. This is more or less how I feel when I watch First Dates. I know everyone else thinks it’s great. I’ve been told it’s charming and sweet and awkward and funny. I’ve been told it’s more authentic than Take Me Out (which I hate) and better than Gogglebox (which I adore), and it’s based on something I wholeheartedly believe in, namely the pursuit of love.
The premise is simple but clever: a selection of people apply online and then go on a blind date at a restaurant and have their interactions filmed for public delectation. Afterwards, they’re asked if they like each other. Some of them do. Some of them don’t. Not all of them feel the same. And therein lies the great injustice of human existence. It’s everything I should like.
So I’ve tried. I have. But whenever I’ve watched an episode, willing myself to be moved, it leaves me cold. There. I’ve said it. Feel free to hate me. I basically hate myself.
The fourth series ended last week, with a marriage proposal. If you haven’t seen it yet, rest assured that’s not a spoiler because the episode was helpfully entitled The Proposal, which seemed a curiously Ronseal, does-what-it-says-on-the-tin approach that removed all dramatic tension.
I’ve thought long and hard about what my problem is with First Dates, and I think it comes down to the fact that it purports to be about love and isn’t. It’s mostly about what happens when you bring together people who will say anything to get laid with other people who have an overwhelming desire to be liked and then put the results on television.
Occasionally it works, and last week’s episode welcomed back five couples who were still dating, including Scott and Victoria, who obligingly got engaged in front of the TV cameras after knowing each other for a mere three months. We were also treated to another visit from the excellent Louisa, a theology student from Exeter who cared about the filling-to-pastry ratio of mince pies and wore a silk shirt pilfered from her mother’s wardrobe (“properly vint-ahhjj,” she told the barman). Louisa was great. I would have liked a show that was just Louisa, with no need for the whole dating thing.
And obviously it’s fine for a reality television programme to seek to entertain. But then we have Fred, the egregiously cheesy maître d’ of this fictional restaurant (which seems to be in a soulless shopping centre in the middle of London’s financial district), saying things like: “You can give without love, but you can’t love without giving” and you just think, well, yes, but that’s not what this is about, is it? This is about ratings and sex and flirtation, and maybe I’m an embittered shell of a human being but I just don’t buy it on any deeper level than that.
Last week The Apprentice reached the infamous interview stage. Historically this has been the moment when at least one candidate gets ripped apart for their nonsensical startup ideas (remember Solomon last year, whose business plan included one sheet of paper covered with pictures of sailing boats?), and this series did not disappoint. Gary was after Lord Sugar’s £250,000 investment to set up what was essentially a mobile disco. Richard wanted it to conquer something called “a growth mountain”, which sounded like an unsightly by-product of too much yeast in his diet. Later he apologised for using “gobblygook”, which had the unintended effect of making gobbledygook itself into gobbledygook. Meta.
As ever, the candidates with the best business ideas got through, which makes all the tasks leading up to this point a total waste of time. It’s a structural flaw at the heart of the programme and I wish it would go back to the original format where Lord Sugar was forced to employ the winner.
Over on BBC4, the third series of the Swedish-Danish detective series The Bridge has been spectacular. The character of homicide detective Saga Norén is one of the great creations of modern drama: a woman who is socially inept but professionally gifted and who elicits our sympathy despite being unable to show empathy herself. Sofia Helin, who plays her, somehow manages to make a virtue out of non-reaction. It’s an astonishing feat of writing and acting and Helin should be given every award going.
The final instalment of Peep Show was, like all the other episodes of Peep Show leading up to this point, brilliant. It was made more brilliant by the continued underplaying of its own brilliance, as if everyone involved knows they’re doing something hilarious but it would be a bit un-British to crow about it.
In this episode, Jez was struggling to keep pace with his drug-guzzling younger boyfriend and facing the prospect of his 40th birthday with some apprehension: “40 is basically 50 and 50 is dead”. Mark, meanwhile, declared his love for April, but obviously it wasn’t quite as straightforward as that, and by the end the El Dude brothers were alone again, sitting in their flat watching a nature documentary about the reintroduction of wolves into the wild. “What next?” muses Mark. “Bring back smallpox? We all had fun with the smallpox, didn’t we? Is it time smallpox had a reboot?”
Farewell, then, Peep Show. I’ll miss you.
