Let’s break this one down and get into whether it will work. Come Date With Me (yes, it’s an adaptation of the Come Dine With Me franchise) is a show about trying to find love through your culinary skills. In each episode there is a group of guys who fancy themselves as great cooks. They are all interested in one woman who has to choose one of them based on how well he cooks.
Prior to this, I was not a big Come Dine With Me fan. Perhaps it had to do with two facts, one; I could not taste what they were cooking and it didn’t help that it always looked fantastic, and two; the depth of knowledge some of the people had just made it obvious that I still have a lot to learn.
Yet Come Date With Me adds The Bachelorette feel to it and is not only about food. Relationships can be formed here and who knows, more spin-offs could come off that.
The genius of this show is that it takes us back to traditional dating. If you liked a girl before restaurants had franchises across the world to do the cooking for you, you had to cook for her. Men always feel the need to impress the women they are interested in, and cooking is the best way to do it. On the women’s side of things, thanks to the fact that men rarely cook, it is intriguing to find one who does, and is not a Gordon Ramsay.
The original version of Come Date With Me was released in Britain and the next one in Canada. In these shows there were a lot of flirty dinner parties, nude life drawing and all the other cheesy things that people do when they are trying to hook up. While Come Dine With Me has done well for itself, Come Date With Me might be bigger because it includes the interests of those who don’t cook. Everyone wants to be in some sort of relationship at some point and what better way of doing it than at the stove?
If it does well, maybe the next title will be Come Live With Me or Come Procreate With Me, which might actually work given our intense need to see into other people’s lives.
l Come Date With Me Australia airs from August 12 on ITV Choice (DStv Channel 123) at 10.50pm.