Review – Dinner Date Australia

Dinner Date Australia – Seven – 9:30pm Tuesday – AUS

Sometimes when a show comes along you can see the care and effort that has been put into it. Whether it’s Channel 7 pouring endless promotion and cash into The X Factor, or Channel 10 prepping their audience for The Renovators; whatever you think of those shows it’s obvious that the network had a long term plan in place when they were created. They set out to create a hit series they wanted to be able to milk for years. Then there are the shows that networks think up at the last minute when they suddenly realize they have a hole in the schedule to fill. Shows that pop into the head of some executive who then needs his latest thought turned into a TV show. Shows that haven’t been thought through, shows that combine elements TV executives think people want to see. Shows like Channel 7’s latest brain fart of a reality series Dinner Date Australia.

Dinner Date has a lot in common with The Boss Is Coming To Dinner from last year; both were quickly put together series about a person going to three people’s houses to eat dinner, and they were both put to air by a channel who bought a British reality series simply because it included cooking. This is cheap trash TV, if you were a viewer tuning in to see romance, cooking or host Manu Feildel – the three things advertised by Channel 7 – you would have been sorely disappointed. There was one single attractive single mum, Simone, and she did go on dates with three guys who all cooked her dinner, but there was no romance, the cooking was quickly brushed over and as for Manu – was he actually involved in this show at all?

Manu popped up to introduce us to the show, then he disappeared for a while handing the narration duties over to somebody’s whose accent isn’t mostly impenetrable. We then went whole ad breaks without seeing the Dancing With The Stars winner, and you can be sure that the lack of Manu is the one element of the show that Seven is guaranteed to cop a lot of flack for. You can see more of Manu in that picture above than you get to see him in Dinner Date, so why was he front and centre in the advertising campaign? The show was obviously put together, and Manu was brought in at the last minute to record a couple of crosses and cash a paycheque. Dinner Date is pretty crappy in its own right, but this is shameless behaviour and it’s hard to see how Channel 7 think they can get away with it.

The ratings should be solid for the first night but that can be attributed to the massive Australia’s Got Talent audience giving Dinner Date a chance, but they will not be there next episode. Cheap reality TV is okay when it has that train wreck element that people can’t look away from (think Jersey Shore) but Dinner Date is far too dull to be any kind of ‘guilty pleasure’. This is an insufferably boring show; the conversations are boring, the food is boring, and it drags on for an hour when it should have been trimmed down to an easy to digest thirty minutes. On top of that the supposed star of the show, Manu, isn’t remotely involved in the show, he doesn’t cook the meals, or offer the guy’s advise, or do anything except deliver some lines that were obviously shot well after the rest of the program was in the can.

The show is strung together with non-Manu delivered cheesy narration that involves freezing the frame, rewinding footage, record scratches, but somehow manages to completely lack a personality. The narration only ever gets a chance to bore us when a pop song isn’t playing over the top of the footage. This is such a baffling mess, the sort of crap you’d expect Channel 9 to pull but is still somewhat surprising to see a top rated network like Seven try to get away with. There’s no point watching Dinner Date Australia, not only is it a worthless television program but it won’t last longer than three weeks before it’s cancelled.

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Ugly

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