Not always completely fine-dining TV heaven (Come Dine With Me)

Member Name: worst_trip

Product:	Come Dine With Me
Date:	01/07/09 (14 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Excellent real-life cooking in real peoples' homes

Disadvantages: Episodes get repeated a lot on the various Channel 4 stations

'Come Dine With Me' is so strangely compelling, that often we'll sit down to repeats even of relatively recently aired shows, in prefernce to anything else that's on.

It's made in a reality-style cooking show format; over the course of working week, five people all from the same town or area take it in turns to host a three-course dinner party for the others, who give them a score out of ten for their efforts at hosting and for the quality of the food. There's a £1000 prize up for grabs for the weekly winner. Given that this is a cooking programme, you can really get an unexpected sense of British regional lifestyles and attitudes regarding all sorts of subjects, while watching 'Come Dine With Me'; and as a lot of the contestants are 'larger than life' types there is often some quite surprising content - as well as, of course, regular personality clashes that lend the show extra entertainment interest. Especially since the show requires contestants to attend five consecutive, and usually all quite boozy dinner parties every night for a week, which can prove quite a strain. Tempers tend to get frayed and usually, by the time we're a few nights into the contest most if not all of the guests will already have become 'tired and emotional' to some extent.

'Come Dine With Me' in many ways burst fully-formed onto our screens - the concept is very simple so there is only a little explanation of the 'rules' at the beginning of each programme, but as a regular viewer I've found it's the little, unspoken background details relating to the show that give it quite a bit of its entertainment value.

For example, reading between the lines, it seems that contestants are allocated some sort of unspecified - potentially quite generous - budget to spend on their dinner parties, the remainder of which I suspect they may be allowed to keep. Most people purchase good quality to luxury ingredients (people are always searing hand-fished scallops to impress their guests on the show) but occasionally the programme features a tight-wad - like the guy who bought five pigs' trotters at 50p each, made soup from them for the starter and then served the twice-cooked feet up as an inedible main course (thus brining in a three course dinner for less than £2 a head). Also it appears that one of the rules of the show is that hosts have to prepare all their three courses on the day of the dinner party - so no advance prep is possible....and it can be entertaining, if a little unkind, to watch self-avowed 'dinner-party gods and goddesses' coming badly unstuck.

The show seems to have been very popular; it's moved from a tea-time Channel 4 slot from 5-6pm ish to prime time at 9pm recently. Each episode used to last half an hour, but for a while the numberof dinner parties was been cut to four and the running time compressed to one hour in total for everyone, which - while the show was still very watchable - was a mistake, as it left less time for focussing on the quirks and foibles of the various contestants, which, combined with the acerbic narration, form the main high-points of the programme. This may have been remedied in the more recent episodes though.

Summary: A reality cooking programme not to be missed