Television
Blind to reality
Martyn Harris
The great puzzle of Blind Date (ITV, 6.30 p.m., Saturday), is why none of the Daters — or should it be Blinders? — have yet got married to each other. They are presentable enough: boy Blinders, with their bomb-shaped suits and high-gloss cheekbones all look like Derek Hatton; girl Blinders with their blonde highlights and hoop earings all look like Jayne Torvill. Each one is the most fun-loving, most strenuously wacky member of the noisiest group at the local disco. They all wind-surf, hang-glide, and have ambitions to travel. A couple of hundred of these well- matched young people must now have passed through Cilia Black's accelerated nuptials — the blind dates are really modern marriages on fast-forward — and the law of averages would seem to expect one proper splicing. But not one has yet made it to the altar. On this week's show Andrea from Croydon wanted a 21-year- old Elvis; Carol from Glasgow asked for someone like Robin Williams; Chris from Jersey fancied the Rachel Wood type and Dave from Kent requested a Michelle Pfeiffer lookalike. Everyone was dis- appointed.
The standard view of the show is that it is a controlled exercise in indecency — a blatant meat rack, moderated only by the mumsy presence of Cilia with her sluggo haircut and chain-store chic. Cued up for a lorra leg-over we are fed instead with a lorra laffs, if that is the right description for the rictus of fascinated embarrassment I have to unscrew from my face after each half-hour of Blinding.
Behind the scenes, says the standard view, there is probably a lorra leg-over that we never hear about, but the standard view is wrong. Blind Date is contrived to ex- clude reality rather than to sample it. Nobody old, ugly or disabled. Nobody widowed, divorced or unemployed. On the first show of the new series Cilia brought back Julian and Fiona from the last show of the previous one. They were a standard pair of Blinders but, for once, the pattern had been broken: amidst a flutter of anticipation in the studio audience, Blind Date was to announce its first wedding, but the camera panned not right to Fiona but left to Wendy, Julian's childhood sweetheart. Wendy was nervous, horsy, speechless and sweet; Julian looked bash- ful. Real life is elsewhere.
Simulated sex appeared again on the dive James show, Saturday Night Clive, (BBC 2, 9.10 p.m., Saturday) in the form of an American male striptease troupe called the Chippendales — perhaps from the polished mahogany bow-fronts of their naked torsos. the Chippendales, in white naval ducks, stripped with some dignity to the theme of An Officer and a Gentleman — and they answered in passing a question which has often troubled me, which is how to take your shoes off in front of a woman without hopping around like a berk. They sat down on chairs and did it.
Later, on a satellite link-up, Clive inter- viewed the naked Chippendales, arranged coyly behind a studio table. It was the first time, the great Australian remarked, he had ever interviewed people with mic- rophones taped to their bare torsos. So, another first for broadcasting.
'What did their parents think of what they were doing?' he asked, and Chip or Dale, or possibly Hepplewhite opined that his parents would probably have preferred him to make use of his engineering degree. 'You don't get to use your intellectual side a great deal. You kinda feel like a hollow vessel sometimes.'
Ruby Wax, Clive's studio guest, re- marked kindly that the Chippendales clear- ly had the kind of brains that if you held their heads to your ears you could hear the sea. 'Put all three in blender and you'd maybe come up with an IQ of fourteen.' Clive James the TV critic started his career talking about the unique power of television to present, unmeditated, the views and personalities of real people. James the TV presenter increasingly fills his shows with fellow professional motor- mouths like John Sessions and Howard Jacobsen and Clive Anderson who, if mixed in a blender might combine to produce Ruby Wax. What would James's parents think of what he is doing now?
Martyn Harris is on the staff of the Sunday Telegraph. His novel Do It Again is to be published in paperback next month by Penguin.
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