Come to my house and eat my food and judge me superficially

It was a fortune or sorts to be able to watch an afternoon episode of the ITV show Dinner Date when on holiday recently. From what I gathered it is, essentially, the younger sibling of Come Dine with Me (C4) with the same premise of people cooking meals and others giving their evenings’ scores. However, to drop in a terribly witty cooking analogy, Dinner Date is served with a side order of seasonal “Passive deconstruction of female empowerment” vegetables.

A single man is taxied, during the week, to the homes of the single women he has chosen to eat with, based on a blind selection of their menus from a raft of menus at the beginning of the show. The women, for their part, expect to impress him enough during their evening to beat the other competing women to “win” a proper date at the end of the week.

A way to a man's heart is through his stomach and the willingness of a lady to cook nice food for their man is the important factor in finding compatibility for a relationship, are rules I would have expected more likely created if the 1950's had simply failed to run out.

You follow each woman as they prepare their 3 course meals, often with an easy listening comedy approach for the afternoon [like a local radio station's afternoon rock programme playing The Eagles] commentary from the off-screen narrator. You get to see the women fret when things go wrong in the kitchen and be relieved when things go right. You see how each woman tries their best to impress with their cuisine presentation on a variety of plates and roof slates and how they concern themselves about the man finding their meal delicious.

And all the time I am watching – there is a thought which persists that I surely can’t be the only one watching is thinking: It doesn’t matter what you cook love, he’s going to choose the tall blonde that he was with the previous night. Honestly, sweetheart, you could cook the soup equivalent of Ruben's painting of the The Massacre of the Innocents, but it aint going to make you any prettier.

And I am not going to pass much more comment about the woman who made an excellent summer berry frozen desert other than she lived with so many birds that she, almost certainly, also smelt of bird.

I wish I was wrong and that the food actually provides some sway in all this but the outcome is crushingly obvious come the time for him to stop enjoying these women serving him food and declare the winner. Will he choose the lady who created that daring and avant-garde flavour combination starter or will he go for the one in the mini-skirt?

For me though, there is a real concept high of the show. The women get to rate the man each after their meal too. They award him up to 3 stars. Ha, ha, the silly women squeezing every ounce of all their tiny brain power to think whether to give him an extra half star. In reality this counts for nothing. Their scores are just cutaway fluff and it is the man’s decision which ultimately counts for all.

When he decides, clearly on the most attractive woman – not even caring that he can’t overly remember what she cooked him [not that this matters anyway with the prize a meal at a restaurant, rather defeating the need for them to be good cooks to begin with] – or that she is way out of his league and he knows there is no future in it – he isn't bothered because she doesn’t get a say. She has to have a meal with him in view of strangers because he chose her and that’s that.

Still, we witness all 3 women getting themselves washed, dressed and perfumed for the prospective winner's end of week date. They, of course, don’t yet know his decision [Really? Not even deep down? Go on, look right down there, I think you’ll find your answer]. The 2 less attractive women get a knock on the door and are handed a microwave meal for 1 by a production flunky. The most attractive woman answers the door to the man.

That this is the Dinner Date's resolution, it feels it is one removed meal away from a man being filmed looking at a few Facebook public profiles on his laptop whilst drinking a cup-a-soup from a hairline fractured mug, then shouting "that one" at the screen and grabbing his jacket.

A man's desire is for the woman, but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

In another sense, Dinner Date is sad narrative of how little we have progressed… men being driven around to women who will freely feed them in raised hope of being picked for a little extra attention from them. In all honesty, it is as if the Spice Girls’ ethos brought through their musical portfolio had never even existed.