Dating No Filter, review: are we here for romance or is this a blood sport?
Channel 4 will be furious. Sky One has taken two of the terrestrial station’s biggest shows – First Dates and Gogglebox – and blended them together to make the rude, crude and fitfully funny Dating No Filter.
It’s very simple: singletons, all of whom look like they are on the reserve list for Love Island, go on awkward dates, while pairs of guffawing comedians watch on from sofas, picking apart their dress sense, dating etiquette and cheesy one-liners. In other countries it would be classed as a blood sport.
The first date found plenty for the comedians to guffaw at, with the pompous Sami, a 20-year-old personal trainer from “Ippy” (Ipswich, to you and I), spectacularly failing to impress 21-year-old Nicole, a perfectly nice healthcare assistant from Colchester (not, thankfully, “Colly”).
Sami was full of the sort of waffle that gets you on shows like this. “I go more for the heart and the head,” he said, cryptically. “And there’s not many people with heads nowadays.” The celebs made hay with his patter and leather trousers, as well as his barmy claim to be mates with Alicia Keys’s brother “Craig Keys”.
Sami swore he went for personality over looks, but he also said what he wants in a girl is “gluteus maximus and pectoralis majors”. As Munya Chawawa, one of the better bitchy comedians here, pointed out: “You don’t learn the Latin term for arse if you’re not interested in looks, do you?”
There were laughs to be had, and the pairing of Daisy May Cooper and Susan Wokoma worked a treat, but too many of the celebs, Joel Dommett included, used it as a platform to try out their bluer material, which became grating.
The bigger problem, however, is the concept: those on the dates are there to be laughed at, by the comedians, by us, therefore they have to be risible – buffoons, braggarts and Barbie dolls. We cannot root for the singletons, as we do so often on First Dates, which robs the show of heart and purpose. Channel 4 can rest easy.
