The most popular shows on television nowadays are property shows and dating shows. The airwaves are littered with both, and all should really have the words “Crisis Edition!” added to their titles in brackets.
In the olden days, people combined the two phenomena. Recall the way in which Jane Austen’s love interests are all hung-up hunks with stately homes attached or the way all your rural relatives consider “road frontage” and “en suites” to be secondary sexual characteristics.
This said, it feels as if contemporary shows are increasingly orbiting this hybrid scenario too. On Love Triangle UK (Monday, E4), hunky singletons are paired up by specialist love boffins (tired TV producers) and given a luxury pad to live in for a while. Given the state of housing, I couldn’t be entirely sure if the contestants are here for love or just to spend a few weeks with a nice kitchen.
As is tradition, we are introduced to a selection of lovelorn hunks who reliably speak to us in the heightened soundbites of Tinder profiles. Shannon, for example, tells us she likes a “bad boy” – evoking Dennis the Menace, Jimmy Krankie and Damien from the Omen. Chlo wants to have it off with a flightless aquatic seabird. “Penguins just have one mate. I just want my penguin,” she says, earnestly.
We already have Great House Revival. What we need now is Feck the Preservation Order, Let’s Knock It and Build an Office Block
Ryan owns a tanning business. Yolanda is a Mel B impersonator. These are Britain’s main industries since Brexit
I feel we’re close now, Meghan, so I can speak freely. The right pitch is crucial in lifestyle hucksterism like yours
On Prime, Jack Reacher is still wandering from town to town, much like the 2FM Roadcaster
Another prospective sensualist named Alex says he “came out of the womb dancing”, which feels unlikely or as if he’s downplaying what must have been a very difficult birth for his mother.
Meanwhile, a hunky gentleman named Asa gives a whole spiel: “I do get very positive reviews of the physique when it comes to taking my top off in front of the opposite sex. I get the wide eyes. They often gasp as well.” I said much the same at my last Irish Times performance review (in response to the question “What do you do around here?”).
As per usual, meeting the contestants is also an opportunity to see job descriptions that the labour economist Richard Scarry never dreamed of. Ryan, for example, is a “tanning business owner”. And Yolanda is “a Mel B impersonator”. Fake tan and the Spice Girls are, of course, Britain’s main industries since Brexit. These are also, as you know, my parents’ professions. And they were my grandparents’ professions before that. (“There’s trouble down tanning factory, Ersatz Mel B!” as my grandmother oft declared.)
The hunkiest contestant is Danny, a short, dense, muscular man who is shaped like an upside-down triangle. Is he the Love Triangle of the title? It is unclear. He is also daubed with body art. A litany of faces cover his wide, spacious torso. Presumably when Danny flexes his abs it looks like these faces are talking. If I was Danny, I’d give each of the faces a different funny voice, depending on my mood.
I’d probably make that my job, to be honest. I’ve been out of the dating game for many decades, but presumably this would make me Tinder’s Best Boy. (I also presume that’s a thing.)
Sadly, it turns out the real reason this show is called Love Triangle UK is not because of Danny’s triangular body but because the show establishes two love interests for each contestant, one they “want” and one they “need”. Each participant corresponds with both of these entities via erotic text before choosing which of them to live with in a fancy love pad. (The second love interest is reintroduced to the situation later in the series.)
At first, when we see these love objects, they are shot entirely from the neck down – not because they have no heads but because their head reveals are intended to be suspenseful. Shannon, for example, chooses a man she calls “Spicy James”, which I hope against hope is the name on his passport. Spoiler alert: Spicy James has a head – a hunky, hunky head.
In fairness to Love Triangle UK, the contestants are earnest and well meaning and not, as has often been the situation with dating shows, monstrous, sexually prolific sociopaths. The world is too dark right now for us to have to reckon with anything other than nice people with real lives.
It can even be quite moving. Shannon has been through chemotherapy recently; Spicy James is touchingly sweet when she tells him about this. Asa has an autism diagnosis that he explains to Chelsea, a kindly Irish midwife. (Hey, she can help Alex’s mam with the “dancing from the womb” situation!)
Some of the contestants are underwhelmed by their choices, though Ryan’s partner can’t seem to get the message (possibly because Ryan keeps kissing him). Everyone seems happy enough at the end of episode one, but harmony is not a desired state for reality-TV producers so episode two will no doubt see disharmonious shenanigans rending them all asunder. Anyway, I like Love Triangle UK (by which I mean, of course, Danny and his potentially vocal abs).
You may prefer to forgo Generation Z’s sexual problems entirely in order to go back to an era when men were real men, women were real women and smallpox was real smallpox. I mean 1883, the name and year of a compellingly gritty prequel to the hugely popular Yellowstone. (It just went up on RTÉ Player.)
It’s another prestige drama eager to wallow in the brutality of pioneer days. (Netflix’s American Primeval does something similar.) Watching our heroes, the Dutton family, negotiate a bustling western town where preachers, snake-oil salesmen and entrepreneurs (mainly sex workers) ply their wares unhindered by the dead hand of the state – all living in the moment, with not a mobile phone in sight – is to look at the United States of America that Trumpy ethnonationalists actually hark back to. (I mean, they’re definitely not harking back to the 1950s and 1960s, an era of generous social spending and high taxation.)
For something a little more socially democratic, check out Toxic Town by Jack Thorne (Netflix). This is the real-life tale of how pregnant women in postindustrial Corby, in the English midlands, were exposed to toxins that harmed their babies, thanks to light-touch regulation and how they ultimately took the town council to court. It’s a moving, angering story filled with lovely character detail thanks to excellent performances from Jodie Whittaker, Aimee Lou Wood and Robert Carlyle.
And while you’re considering how Thatcherite neoliberalism creates a dystopia for ordinary people, you can also watch Michael Sheen’s Secret Million Pound Giveaway (Channel 4), a documentary in which the actor uses his own money to buy the debt of real people so he can cancel it. He’s doing this to demonstrate the way unscrupulous lenders overload vulnerable people with debt and to campaign for protective legislation.
Both of these shows demonstrate that television can still aim for real political impact. Though this isn’t meant as a slight on the Love Triangle (by which I mean Danny).
