First Dates
Channel 4
****
In and Out of the Kitchen
BBC Four
**
Tim, Tim nice but . . . Well, what is wrong with Tim? The first returnee of the third series of First Dates, the show in which a restaurant is rigged to record the excruciating details of blind dates, is not dim. He is not horrible — indeed he speculates that his lack of bad-boy cred may be part of his problem. He looks OK too, in a wiry-haired, geeky, never-been-kissed sort of way. His date last week called him a “delight”, but as Tim summarised last night, he knows all the words to “Sorry, don’t fancy you.”
I think Tim’s problem is dating etiquette. His victim last night was Sarah, single for three years and near the end of her tether with dating. Her pitch was honesty. Tim’s was sit-down comedy. So his ice-breaker at the bar was “What does a man with an eight-inch c*** have for breakfast?” Answer: “Well this morning I had a boiled egg.” The ice formed. At the table he played the Meg Ryan part in the When Harry Met Sally fake-orgasm routine. All seemed lost when he improvised a love limerick that rhymed “the wine was even better” with “mate her”.
Remarkably, however, Sarah responded to this with a cross-table knuckle-knock which they simultaneously “exploded” by aerobatically unclenching their fists. Even now, however, Tim annihilated the simpatico of the moment by turning his fingers into “shrapnel” and smearing them over Sarah’s alarmed face.
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He said she should be thankful it wasn’t her “boobs” and retired to the loo. Tim by now had extracted defeat from the jaws of victory so often he could have taken up dentistry. Yet it turned out Sarah was enamoured. Asked to rate him as a date, she said he was “nearing a ten”. To this tune, Tim did not know the lyric. It was the sweetest of moments.
I have always loved First Dates and never understood its lacklustre ratings. They have tweaked the format yet again, finding a role for a Shakespeare-quoting maître d’. The diners are whisked away in cabs, singly or in couples, à la The Apprentice. The changes are no help at all. You either enjoy this level of embarrassment or you don’t.
It isn’t about the food. In and Out of the Kitchen, a sitcom translated from Radio 4, is about the food, but shouldn’t be. The writer Miles Jupp’s achievement is to devise a new way to do cooking on TV. Last night’s opener contained a recipe for crab bisque and another for Victoria sponge. Unfortunately the comedy ingredients failed either to thicken or rise.
Damien Trench, the cookery writer, played by Jupp, had only effete to define him. His boyfriend, Anthony (Justin Edwards), just wanted to lose weight. The trendy restaurant where the fizzy beef (steak with pop poured over it) was served by an over-chummy Scottish waiter was far funnier than Trench.
The sophistication of the comedy can be judged by the laxative courgette-soup jokes and the equally running gag that Salman Rushdie was plaguing Trench’s agent with calls for advice on his washer dryer. Two stars, and neither of them Michelins.