Channel 4's spin-off show marks an interesting point in Come Dine With Me's evolution, but it is a risky gamble
A new show started on Channel 4 this week. It's a kind of culinary gameshow about a single woman who has to go and eat at the homes of single men before choosing one of them to go on a date with. It sounds a bit like another Come Dine With Me rip-off, doesn't it? It sounds like another House Guest or Four In A Bed or Dinner Date or The Devil's Dinner Party or Michael Winner's Dining Stars or Instant Restaurant or Restaurant In My Living Room.
To be fair, that's exactly what Come Date With Me is. But it's also made by the same people who make Come Dine With Me, right down to the Dave Lamb voiceover.
The show itself sticks to the winning Come Dine With Me formula as closely as possible. People still eat at other people's houses over the course of a week, and those people are generally idiots, and Dave Lamb regularly reminds us of this fact at a frequency that maybe only bats can hear. However, Come Date With Me does deviate in a few key ways.
On Monday's show, for instance, we met Tracey, a breezy young woman out looking for love. She was tasked with cooking for five would-be suitors – specifically an awful banker, an awful barman, an awful stand-up comedian, an awful mechanic and a silent, yet presumably awful, salesman. At the end of the night she kicked one out and proceeded to date each of the others a day at a time, starting yesterday with the awful stand-up. At the end of the week she'll pick a winner and they'll go on a big £1,000 date together.
It marks an interesting point in Come Dine With Me's evolution. In the five years since its inception, it's ballooned from a cheap daily daytime gameshow to a primetime staple, taking in countless celebrity specials, spin-off merchandise and constant, ubiquitous multichannel repeats along the way. Its popularity has spawned all kinds of imitators, and Come Date With Me would seem to be Come Dine With Me's attempt to stop them all dead. Come Date With Me seems like a throwing down of the gauntlet, offering viewers the full hit of a dating-based Come Dine With Me rather than the watered down stand-in of say ITV's Dinner Date.
It's a risky gamble. If it fails, it'll weaken an entire CDWM brand that's already showing early signs of fatigue. Fortunately, it's a gamble based on a solid platform. There have been so many episodes of Come Dine With Me that the show knows where its strength lies – getting a load of idiots in a room together and letting Dave Lamb shriek at them. This also forms the crux of Come Date With Me, so fans of the original are unlikely to be disappointed.
It also helps that Come Date With Me is extremely watchable – on the basis of the first week alone, it seems to have mined a new well of genuinely objectionable contestants – so all the signs point to it being a success. Fingers crossed that Come Dine With Me doesn't get cocky and start taking on its other imitators, though. Especially not Michael Winner's Dining Stars. Nobody needs to see that.
