The 'Come Dine With Me' TV show has been a hit in several countries and has now crept into Irish kitchens and dining rooms, writes ROSITA BOLAND
WHEN YOU have people round for dinner, particularly if you don’t know them well, you’re unlikely to end up passed out in bed early in the evening while your guests finish cooking the meal. If you knew there were going to be TV cameras in your house, the probability of that unfortunate scenario happening is even less.
Following the popularity of Come Dine With Me, the hugely popular reality television show running on Channel 4 since 2005, there have been attempts to copy it here. The brilliantly simple format has four or five people, living in the same town but not previously known to each other, hosting a dinner at home, with guests wandering round the house, drinks in hand, poking through wardrobes, delightedly examining bedrooms, bookshelves and bathrooms, commenting freely to camera all the while. The tantrums, personality clashes, bad cooking, bizarre house interiors, outfits, and the effect of too many drinks on the ability of the host to finish serving dinner, all contribute to the compulsive viewing, along with the guests' final scores for food, presentation and ambiance.
The TV format has been sold to several other countries, but not yet to Ireland. Ben Frow, who is head of programming at TV3, would love to make an Irish version of the show but “the problem is that the show is made by Granada for Channel 4”.
But this hasn't stopped Irish people from doing their own tongue-in-cheek versions of the show at home, as has anecdotally happened in every other country Come Dine With Mehas aired in.
Aerospace lawyer Seaneen Sullivan, originally from the Swan Valley in Australia, recently won the best newcomer blog at the Irish Blog awards for 9beanrow.com. She is currently planning her first Come Dine With Meevening.
" Come Dine With Mehas changed dinner parties forever, because it has made it so competitive. It's a great bit of voyeurism: finding out what people cook for others when they are entertaining. But it would be nothing without voiceover; the sarcastic comments are great," she says.
There will be five people at Sullivan’s evening next month, which she and her friends have been planning “for the guts of a year”, more to try to schedule time when they are all free, rather than wondering what they’ll cook.
Hers will be the first of the five. Sullivan’s tentative menu is a Mediterranean-style starter plate with dips; either venison or salmon for a main; and rhubarb fool. “And definitely beetroot risotto because I have a glut of beetroot in my freezer.”
They haven’t yet decided if they’ll score the evenings or not. “No one wants to come in last place at a dinner party. But we’re going to have a voiceover person. She doesn’t actually cook, so it’s a way of including her. But there won’t be rifling though wardrobes or anything like that.”
Aoife McElwain, a DJ and food blogger at icanhascook. wordpress.com, has hosted three series of evenings to date in Dublin. “I’ve done it twice with girls I went to school with. We all loved the programme, and thought it would be a great way to commit to get together – and also none of us could cook at that point, so we thought it would be a great way of making an extra effort,” she explains.
McElwain and her friends adapted the format by hosting in three teams of two. For one series, they decided to focus on the cuisine of different countries, and drew lots for France, Spain and Italy. She drew France and they cooked “a seven-course meal that was deceptively fancy, which included a paté course, a sorbet course – which we bought in the shop – and a cheese course. To get extra points, we projected the film Amelie on the wall during dinner and had Edit Piaf and French songs playing on the iPod.” They won.
“We had a neutral judge and everyone e-mailed him the marks in secret. We met together in a pub afterwards and got the results. It was hilarious to watch other friends get competitive over the results – hearing they’d lost marks for using a red wine glass instead of white; that kind of thing. We might try doing the themed night again, but with less straightforward cuisine next time, maybe Irish or Caribbean, something like that.”
So far, all McElwain's Come Dine With Meevenings have been with friends, but she is now tentatively planning for the next one to be with strangers. "That would be hilarious!"
