Too hot to mangle
My foray into reality dating shows has bemused me, so now it should bemuse you
It’s hard for any high brow to avoid being predictable when dissecting pop culture. Snobbery, always latent in any Englishman, is tough to resist. Ironic enjoyment is mandatory, while sincere pleasure must be accompanied by embarrassment.
These are the rules, and no doubt I’ll be guilty of all the above by the end of this piece, which I should warn readers concerns reality dating shows that I’ve recently watched. Those of you who came for the election forecasts or that curveball travel piece on Sheffield may want to turn back now.
We’ll start with the concepts. Too Hot to Handle takes ten beach body ready twenty-somethings to a holiday retreat and demands that they not shag each other. Taking an ostensibly opposite course, Married at First Sight hitches a bunch of couples together and sees if they can survive the weeks until the show wraps.
Both try to maintain, with varying sincerity, the notion that they are on a mission to form “deeper connections”, in Too Hot’s phrase. Married even refers to itself as an “experiment”, with the rictus grins on the therapist hosts’ faces suggesting they might believe there is some scientific merit to the exercise.
Of course, the main point of these shows is to generate gossip, especially in gossip-light times. While it is excuse-making to say I only watched this crap because of lockdown, it didn’t harm my appetite for such antics that I’ve been under effective house arrest for much of the last 18 months.
The Tory columns bemoaning the permissive society that spawned such shows will have written themselves. In cloisters the world over, preachers will have worked in snide comments into their sermons, much like the priest who snarked at gay marriage during a wedding I attended.
Such views overlook the odd conservatism about both shows. Too Hot posits casual sex as a barrier to those “deeper connections”, while the pitch for Married is that we should give arranged marriages another go: the kind of idea that reactionaries flog every time they peer across to the Indian subcontinent.
That said, neither show is much of an advert for abstinence or arranged marriages. My vague googling – which should serve me some interesting display ads later – has revealed that a few Married couples have lasted several years after the show’s airing, and there is at least one pair from Too Hot that are living together. These are not the kind of odds for survival you’d want a doctor to give you.
Still more ironic are the progressive complaints about the Australian version of Married, alleging that it was cheapening the institution of marriage even while gay marriage remained illegal in that country. “Morally unsound” was the not inaccurate verdict of one petitioner, though perhaps not for the reasons given.
Others have argued that Married has ignored warning signs of an abusive relationship. Several years before some social media critics claimed that allowing cheating contestants to stay on the show was a tacit endorsement of adultery.
Perhaps I’m being cynical, but I doubt the execs behind any reality dating show are that wedded to any outcome so long as the footage is entertaining. It is, for sure, awkward when even your presenter kills herself, but television lives by eyeballs, not body counts. (Love Island, to be fair, is updating its pastoral care in the wake of such deaths.)
Less noted is that Married and Too Hot have psychological wellbeing baked into the format. The Australian Married is literally hosted by three shrinks, while Too Hot’s latter episodes are mostly therapeutic workshops, one of which encouraged male guests to literally talk to their penises.
If there is a lesson to such absurdities, it is that reality television may not be the ideal condition for personal growth or self-reflection, loin-based or otherwise. It is also testament to our ongoing bemusement with romantic relationships, even if there is much cheap entertainment to be had in watching others fail at them.