RTÉ has just brought back First Dates. Over on Virgin Media it’s time for Worst Dates. Eating with the Enemy (Virgin Media Two, Monday, 10.35pm) is cringe-heavy reality TV dressed up as a social experiment, in which individuals with radically divergent perspectives break bread over a frank exchange of views.
As anyone who has ever earwigged on a couple rowing in public will know, human conflict is a source of enduring fascination. The added spice with Eating with the Enemy is that some of its participants are quasi-famous. Episode one, for instance, features the media bruiser George Hook and the comedian and Traveller-rights campaigner Martin Beanz Warde.
But this is less a ding-dong shoutfest than awkward therapy session. Hook, who is now 81, growls and waggles his eyebrows. He also revisits the comments that he says got him sacked from Newstalk in 2017. (He was suspended, returning with a lower-profile show the following year.) “I had – and it cost me my job – certain views that when we send our girls out we have a responsibility to tell them that if they have 10 vodkas they’re not in a good position to defend themselves against predatory males,” he tells Warde. “And that was viewed that I was sort of supporting a rape culture.”
Warde has already revealed that he “doesn’t like shouty people”. And he tells Hook that free speech has its limits. “Where’s the fun in doing the racist joke?”
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We are also introduced to Orlaith, a Co Antrim estate agent with a background in beauty pageants who took part in an early season of the Channel 4 reality series Big Brother. Her dinner companion is Mikey, a Belfast father of five who describes himself as a feminist.
“I’m a female, but I’m not a feminist,” Orlaith says. Mikey doesn’t buy it. “From what she said ... she does not understand what feminism is.”
The final pairing is Im, a libertarian from the Netherlands, and Saturn, an activist. They clash over the merits of capitalism and the state of housing market. But they, along with Orlaith and Mikey, are a sideshow to Hook and Warde.
The two disagree a lot. But they also reach a place of mutual understanding. Hook reveals that he wore women’s underwear when he was seven years old. He also talks about 20-plus years wasted in a business career that he was ill suited to and that led him, he says, to consider “ending it all”.
The participants are fed prompts – Do you believe in feminism? What questions do people always ask you? – via a tablet. Watching in the wings are Dr Malie Coyne, a clinical psychologist, and Richard Hogan, a psychotherapist. The point of the questions, they say, is to encourage debate. Otherwise, people would exchange small talk and stay in their safe zones.
Hook, at least, cannot be accused of this. Asked about his biggest regret, he talks about the way he treated his late mother.
“She was old. Eventually, she was dying. I didn’t give my mother the time. Here is this woman who has done everything, everything. And I’m not there. It’s why I believe in heaven. I’m going to get there and she’s going to be there: ‘Howya, Mam. I’m really sorry ... I came good at the end.’”
Warde’s response is full of empathy. “I think there’s a sadness in you that makes you more human than what the media made you out to be,” he says. Viewers will have their own opinions.
For Virgin Media, the question is whether it was a good decision to invite Hook to take part. You come away feeling that, as was perhaps inevitable, he has swallowed Eating with the Enemy whole and made it all about him.
