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#GAY DATING GAME SHOW TV#
But now Channel 5, broadcaster of beloved TV classics like Touch the Truck and Celebrity Super Spa, has brought it back! And it’s 2017, so they can’t pretend queer people don’t exist any more! Now hosted by everyone’s favourite gay uncle and ex-drag queen, Paul O’Grady, the new and improved Blind Date aired six episodes this summer. Blind Date started in 1985 and ran for almost twenty years until, in an incredibly baller move, host Cilla Black quit the show live on air. Simultaneously the granddaddy of dating shows and the new kid on the block. In true reality television style, I’ll be giving each show a score based on two metrics: the amount of queer content, and to what degree that content will leave you silently begging it to end. However, I can guarantee you that it’s the most comprehensive review of the relative queerness of British dating shows you’re going to read this week. This list isn’t going to cover every single dating show on UK television, because I only have Freeview and quite frankly I’m a little too scared to go digging around the more obscure satellite channels. And back then you only had to keep up with a couple of shows! Who has time to sift through all the dating shows out there to work out which ones have queer content, never mind which of those make you wish they hadn’t bothered? At least when talent shows were the big thing we had Alex Parks and Lucy Spraggan. What’s a queer girl to do? The weird model of romance these shows rely on might not suit… well, anybody really, but it’s not fun being left out of the party. If you started a drinking game based on how many times either “All the Things She Said” or “I Kissed a Girl” is played behind the introduction of a queer woman alone, you wouldn’t live to see the end of it. Even when we are included, queer contestants are often covered up in episode descriptions and the dates themselves can be unbearably cringeworthy.
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Hell, a few years ago, ITV2 aired a dating show literally called Girlfriends that was somehow entirely heterosexual. While we’ve seen a steady increase in the number of mainstream dating shows willing to open their doors to queer singletons since then, many remain depressingly straight. The fierce backlash to the revival of Playing it Straight – in which a woman had to determine which of a number of potential male partners were secretly gay – in 2012 hopefully closed that era for good. We started to see LGBTQ folk appear in the 2000s, but it was limited to grim stunt shows like the wildly transphobic There’s Something About Miriam and American import A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila. We’ve had Sexy Beasts, a show in which daters were covered in prosthetics and transformed into mythical creatures before they hooked up, but queer romance has been a step too far for most of the history of dating shows. However, this love affair has traditionally been exclusively heterosexual.
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The nation still hasn’t entirely recovered.
#GAY DATING GAME SHOW SERIES#
The dating show craze hit its peak this summer with the latest series of Love Island, which ended up becoming such a phenomenon the finale was screened in cinemas and journalists wouldn’t stop asking Labour leader and absolute boy Jeremy Corbyn who his favourite contestant was (it was Marcel). When exactly did the British public fall in love with dating shows? It’s been a quiet takeover, but somehow the TV schedules have ended up filled with lonely hearts looking for love, from lunchtime marathons of Dinner Date to the late-night sleaze of Naked Attraction.