1 hour ago
6
If there is one tried and true formula when it comes to television, it is this: when you run out of ideas, bring the kids in. This formula is why everything from MasterChef to The Great British Bake Off to Taskmaster has, at some point, bitten the bullet and introduced a junior version. And now it’s time for Come Dine With Me to join the gang.
Which is probably a bit late, all said. It took five years for MasterChef to bring in a junior version, and just one for Bake Off. Meanwhile, Come Dine With Me is 20. To call it long in the tooth would be a profound disservice to long teeth.
Come Dine With Me: Teens – for that is the title of the new series – just drives this point home further. The contestants who appear are between 16 and 19 years old. This means that they are all younger than Come Dine With Me. Not a single one of them knows what it is to live in a world where Come Dine With Me has yet to be invented. If that doesn’t make your skin sag and your bones creak, I’m not sure what will.
Why did it take Come Dine With Me so long to bring in a teen version? The answer, you suspect, probably had something to do with its presentation. The thing that has always set Come Dine With Me apart from its army of imitators is Dave Lamb, who doesn’t so much narrate episodes as audibly roll his eyes at them. In its purest form, Come Dine With Me is raw footage of people doing their best to cook a nice meal while Dave Lamb calls them all idiots. And while that might be funny when your cook is a self-consciously wacky man from Tonbridge, it’s less funny when it’s an innocent teenager.
Fortunately, on the basis of Monday’s first episode (of five; a longer run is planned in the near future), Lamb has toned down his Lambiness a little bit. He’s less of an attack dog here and, while this suits the age of the contestants, you can still sometimes hear him choke back on his instincts to be sarcastic.
For example, one of the young contestants is Ben, a gym bunny who takes to kissing his own biceps whenever there’s a camera on him. Had Ben been 35, there is a very good chance that Lamb would have ripped him to shreds. But he is a teenager, and even when he admits to thinking that a beef wellington is a type of footwear (an open goal if ever there was one), the best Lamb can manage in response is a strangulated “I get your logic”.
That said, maybe he’s just warming up. The joy of Come Dine With Me has always been watching it evolve over the week, with everyone’s quirks and flaws becoming more apparent as the episodes wear on. By Friday, there’s a very good chance that the teenagers will have worn Lamb down. There were even signs of it on Monday, with Lamb screaming “SHUT UP” when two contestants revealed that they had never eaten soup before.
A bigger problem, though, is how dull it is to watch. You might put this down to the age of the contestants. They are, after all, blank slates to whom nothing interesting has ever happened; they have had nothing like enough time to build up the levels of resentment necessary to unleash a “What a sad little life, Jane” outburst.
But possibly it’s bigger than that. Possibly the format has just ossified. This is far from the first spin-off that Come Dine With Me has attempted. Daytime Come Dine With Me begat primetime Come Dine With Me, which in turn begat Celebrity Come Dine With Me, then Couples Come Dine With Me, and then Come Dine With Me: The Professionals. For a while we even had Come Date with Me, which might as well have just been a gif of Dave Lamb eating himself.
Come Dine With Me: Teens might spark to life eventually. One of this week’s intake is a catering student who dresses as Elvis, has no working knowledge of pop culture and brings tubs of Celebrations everywhere he goes. With a little coaxing and a creative edit, he might just blossom into a Come Dine With Me eccentric for the ages. But for now, it doesn’t feel likely. Let’s score it four out of 10 in the back of a taxi when it isn’t listening.
Come Dine With Me: Teens is on Channel 4 now.
Join Stuart Heritage and other Guardian journalists at a special live event hosted by Nish Kumar on 26 Nov. Book tickets at theguardian.com/guardian-live-events
