When I was young, people didn’t really talk about sexual matters with their parents. The exactly three times my parents had sex in order to conceive me and my two siblings were never mentioned when I was growing up. And we were completely fine about that and grew up healthily and happily with no weird hang-ups at all about what I call “God’s disgustingly special happy time for people who love each other very much”.
Nonetheless, going by the number of programme formats about dating on television nowadays, the younger generation is now so clueless about procreation that the television industry has had to get involved, like zookeepers trying to encourage shy penguins.
We meet Katie, a chirpy singleton who laments all the men she meets on dating apps who 'expect you to fling your hoop at them'. That's a Seamus Heaney quote, I believe
Shows on dating I have recently reviewed include:
- Love Island, in which a selection of hunks are put in a villa with booze and swimwear on something that's not technically an island. It is, as I've stressed in the past, not so much a "love island" as a "lust archipelago".
- Married at First Sight, in which Americans are married to someone they have just met after a brief period speaking to them because a television producer told them to. ("Because a television producer told me to" is now a legitimate defence in US courts. I'm pretty sure Trump will use it during his impeachment trial.)
- Five Guys a Week, in which a young woman has a load of men move into her house, much like a modern day Snow White or Smurfette or Thatcher.
Following the trend, Pulling with My Parents (Monday, RTÉ1) is a show in which young people attempt to "pull" with their parents. This involves various progenitors, siblings and family friends reading through the volunteering youngsters' Tinder chats and puppeteering their dates, Bergerac style, from a nearby "spy van". (When I say Bergerac, I mean, of course, the large-nosed French romantic hero and not the detective played by John Nettles who solved crimes on Jersey back in the 1980s. Though, to be honest, Nettles's no-nonsense approach might have been of more use.)
Patrick Freyne’s TV of 2021: More Sally Rooney ridey stuff and a return to Middle Earth
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Did you know Last Christmas used to be called Stephen’s Day Is a Bit Sh*t?
In the first episode of the new series we meet Rob from Limerick, who is daubed from head to toe in tattoos. In the middle of his first interview I realise he's literally being tattooed as he speaks. I imagine this happens to Rob all the time. Presumably a passing tattooist just set to work on an empty patch of skin. Rob calls desirable mates "butterflies" and later discusses catching them in "a net", which is sort of sweet. Well, it's sweet if he's speaking metaphorically. It's not so sweet if you think of Terence Stamp in The Collector.
Rob is being sexually stage-managed for the duration of the episode by his mother. Yes, I’m no psychoanalyst, but I imagine that, as soon as this show was commissioned, every book by Freud spontaneously combusted and thousands of psychotherapists stared vacantly at their clients and muttered “What’s the point?”
The first dates involve archery and shooting. I feel like the decision to give the participants weapons while distracting them with earpiece babble is an act of cunning stage management
We also meet Katie, a chirpy singleton who laments all the men she meets on dating apps who "expect you to fling your hoop at them". That's a Seamus Heaney quote, I believe. Katie is taken in hand by her sister Yvonne and her father, a man who is interviewed in a shed filled with power tools and has the gruff persona of the type of man who would be interviewed in a shed filled with power tools.
“Dad does have the tools to avoid a dating disaster!” says the narrator, as the camera focuses on some power tools. I like the narrator. Later we see some fruit going into a blender and he suggests things are going to get “a bit fruity”. Such double entendres are particularly charming given that the people he’s narrating say sentences like, “Do you like anal?” and, “Some guy sent me a dick pic before breakfast” (Heaney again, I think). It feels like the double entendre is obsolete and that it’s going to be single entendres all the way down from now on. So it’s nice to see someone keeping the faith.
The programme starts with the various familial love coaches sifting through their loved ones’ dating apps in order to be appalled by the photo choices (“If you went missing and someone put that up as your poster no one would know who you are”) and the obligatory filth. It would appear, for example, that penis pictures have become so commonplace that they’re probably a valid currency in some countries. Then Rob’s mother reads an interaction on Instagram in which Rob responds to one woman’s advances with the news that he is “rock hard”.
“I had to say something back, Mam,” says Rob, which is kind of amazing. He was just being polite. Then, in a cursory nod to Freud, who is at this stage weeping in hell, Rob acknowledges that having his mother read about his erection might make the walk home a bit “awkward”.
I'm not convinced that having mothers bellowing Antipodean advice from a 'spy van' is really the future of Irish dating, but I've seen worse romantic plans. I'm looking at you, reader
Eventually potential partners are discussed by the committee and dates are arranged. During these dates the parents communicate via earpieces from the comfort of the “spy van”. The first dates involve archery and shooting. I feel like the decision to give the participants weapons while distracting them with earpiece babble is an act of cunning stage management. Nobody ends the show wandering around screaming with an arrow sticking out of their shoulders while the narrator talks of “Cupid’s bow” but at least the producers tried.
Instead, they add a section in which the parents take to desperately pleading with strangers on the street to date their offspring. You know... the way your parents do. The show ultimately ends with poor Katie being stood up by one of her dates and Rob "netting" a human butterfly from Australia. "Tell her about how much you love Alf Stewart in Home and Away!" advises his mother through the earpiece.
I’m not convinced, to be honest, that having mothers bellowing Antipodean advice from a “spy van” is really the future of Irish dating, but I have to say that everyone in this show seems likeable and well-meaning and I’ve seen worse romantic plans (I’m looking at you, reader). Given the reminders we’ve had this week of the awful things sexual shame did to this country, it’s kind of sweet seeing people frankly discussing Tinder filth with their folks. Also, poor Freud. He was wrong about so much.
