Come Dine with Me

Always an upper to watch Come dine with me is a sure bet Raise your appetite with some laughs A truly reliable winning horse

5 strangers vie to win £1000 prize each stranger hosts and prepares a 3 course homemade meal the diners then score the meal each out of 10 In secret. At the end of the week when all have hosted the scores are revealed and the highest score wins the money. I love this show the people who are hosts are all so different and interesting the narration in between is done by Dave Lamb he is excellent his dry sarcastic humour has me in fits of laughter and he really makes this show .

If you have never watched it and get the chance I would highly recommend

COME DINE WITH ME now occupies a large slice of Channel 4's daytime schedule, with episodes running at lunchtime, late afternoon and most of Saturday afternoon. Channel 4's sister station More4 runs more episodes in the early evening. Watching several episodes back to back allows certain themes to emerge: the food selection by each contestant is often repetitive; the contestants have entrenched attitudes; their judgments are affected very much by the desire to win the competition; and all of them are more than ready to act in front of the ubiquitous television camera. Dave Lamb's narration contributes to the overall jokey atmosphere, as he makes fun of the contestants' pretensions. From a sociological perspective, however, COME DINE WITH ME is a fascinating text, as it encapsulates within each twenty-five-minute episode the enduring class, gender and age prejudices of most of the contestants. Anyone who thinks that contemporary Britain has changed in terms of its social structure, as compared with, say, half a century ago, would have their assumptions readily undermined here. Snobberies, racial prejudices, and gender jealousies still exist, even if they are perhaps more politely expressed than they might have once been.

Much of the world regarded France as the home of good food. If the English ate to live then the French lived to eat it was said. But much has changed in England in the last 30 years or so. Never have so many taken such interest in good food. The dullness and poor quality of English "cuisine" has been replaced by ultra-cosmopolitan and much more skillful versions. All stimulated very largely by television.

The model for civilised dining both at its most formal and as a refined pleasure was French. In a sense it became the European ideal of civilised living - good food, good conversation overseen by a host who combined cooking as well as subtle human skills.

But England has very recently produced an illegitimate and ugly offspring - a boorish variant which (and who) while skilled in the technicalities - the preparation and the judging of food, even the aesthetics of the dining environment is entirely deficient in feelings. Worse than psychopathic where there may be attempts to conceal this, boorishness can be worn as a badge of pride.

So we have Come Dine With Me - reality TV in which contestants in fact competitors, sometimes aggressive, are brought together in a latter day bear pit to chew at each others food - and legs - in return, like most distasteful activities, for a large amount of cash. As in a version of The Prisoners Dilemma each must decide a strategy - be nice and hope to get good marks from the others or be nasty all round. Many opt for compromise: publicly complimentary to the host then rude about everything and everyone each time they are alone with the camera. Many confide to the camera their own immeasurable skills and the others' manifold defects. Meals, unsurprisingly are frequently tense affairs where a host who had previously boasted on camera struggles to match a quarter of his or her boasts. We the audience look with interest as sometimes there are glimpses of skill and originality but more interestingly we see vanity crushed before our eyes, if we are lucky one or more of the competitors become distressed and tearful. Like Big Brother its conceptual stable-mate we are encouraged to watch bloodless combat. Civilised dining has become in Come Dine with Me simply eating and backbiting.

Great idea for a show but I'm constantly amazed at what the contestants don't know when it comes to international foods.