Think blind dates couldn’t get any worse? Try this

By Alice Fulwood

I am trying to decide if the two strangers I am watching on a blind date are into each other. There is no denying they look good together. Nick, who works in a sewage treatment plant, is tall and charming with broad shoulders and a thick “New Joi-see” accent. Bri is slim and blonde with a dry wit, a southern drawl and a job in sales for a large tech company. He seems interested; she is harder to read. Their audience is deeply invested in the fate of their relationship, exhibiting a prurient curiosity that reality-television executives have exploited for the last 30 years. But this date is not being captured on camera. Nick and Bri are live on stage, just a few feet away from their audience, in the basement of a swanky New York hotel.

Since the advent of reality TV, dating shows have let viewers indulge their curiosity about other people’s love lives by giving them a front-row seat to the action. Such shows have proved enormously popular. “The Bachelor”, in which single women vie for the affections of a chiselled Adonis, garnered the second-largest live television when it aired in America this year. In 2018 the finale of the fourth season of “Love Island”, a British show which locks ten gym-honed fitties in a Spanish villa for eight weeks, drip-feeding them romantic rivals every few days, was the second most-watched hour of television on ITV, one of Britain’s prime television channels – only the World Cup was more popular. But many viewers have grown wise to the way that producers script, structure and edit these shows. They argue that there is nothing “real” about reality TV.