Would you swallow or spit? (Come Dine With Me)

Member Name: aylawarner

Product:	Come Dine With Me
Date:	18/05/09 (61 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great cooking programme and also a funny show

Disadvantages: Too long

Come Dine With Me is a programme where five strangers are thrown together and given the task of cooking and entertaining each other in a quest to win a £1,000 reward. Each night, each person takes it in turns to prepare and cook their guests a fabulous three course meal hoping that their's will outdo all the rest. The programme shows what each host makes and how they make it and you can also find their recipes on the channel 4 website to try out for yourself. Whilst preparing the meals, they also have to entertain their guests in order to be the best host as well as the best cook. While the host is busy cooking away in the kitchen, the four guests take a nosey peek around their house to come to their own conclusions about each other. On their way home in the cab, after they have eaten their food and got drunk on the wine, each guests scores the host giving them a mark out of ten. Once every person has cooked and entertained for everyone and the scores are added up, the person with the highest score wins £1,000.

I really wasn't interested in this show when it first became popular on Channel 4 and More 4, thinking it was all about cooking, which I don't like and can't do very well. But after watching it a couple of times when there's been nothing else on TV, it's actually quite a funny programme.

Each random group of five people, knowing nothing about one another and all having completely different tastes, are thrown together in one of the most personal yet awkward situations and are forced to socialise and eat each others food. There are often clashes and this is what makes the show what it is in my opinion. You get a mixture of all sorts of people enjoying all different types of food - meat lovers, vegetarians, vegans, modern, traditional - and each host has to make sure they cater for everyone's individual appetite. If one person doesn't particularly like some aspect of someone else's evening, they often try to hide it and swallow the food with a smile. Or some are blatantly honest which can cause some hosts to get quite offended and, in turn, they can end up being quite shallow and petit when their turn comes around. Each person tries to cook up something really fancy to try to impress their guests which often ends up going wrong, whether it's a forgotten ingredient, burnt vegetables, or a dessert that hasn't risen.

The pain about the show is that each half hour episode shows only one evening so, to get the full show with each of the five people entertaining, you end up watching two and a half hours of it which can get a little long and tiring! They often also do celebrity shows and they sometimes condense a show into only an hour episode, but having only four people instead.

If you like cooking shows then this is a brilliant one to watch as some of the meals people cook up look and sound really tasty. Or, even if you don't like cooking, this is still a fairly good show to watch just for a laugh at how different people react with other when thrown into situations like this. I know for sure that I would hate complete strangers coming to snoop around my house while I'm cooking food for them and I would also hate going to someone's house I don't know and having them cook me a meal. I'd be far too polite to say I didn't like something and I'd feel that I'd just have to swallow it all and smile anyway! I'm sure no one would be happy with my choice of meal which would probably be beans on toast!

Summary: A great show to watch if there's nothing else better on TV