Come Dine With Me

by Stephen Armstrong

This is, without question, the worst middle-class nightmare imaginable. You are hosting a dinner party, you serve an ambitious new recipe to impress your guests but they arrive late, everything goes wrong, the food ends up overcooked, everybody hates it and when you try to feed the leftovers to your cat, it throws up. But at least your humiliation is not broadcast on national television to an audience of almost 4m with your guests marking your cooking out of 10 in front of the cameras.

Welcome to the televised hell of Come Dine With Me, a humble Channel 4 daytime programme that has become a worldwide phenomenon with versions sold to Croatia, Greece, Spain, France, Australia Scandinavia, Germany (where it’s called, with Teutonic menace, Das Perfekte Dinner) and even the United States.

The rules are simple. Four hosts take turns to hold a dinner party with a budget of £125 for all food and drink. Each guest votes on the quality of each meal and the atmosphere created by the host and the winner gets £1,000. Unusually for reality TV, the rules can be interpreted liberally and the production team rarely gets involved. One host spent just £10 on her entire three-course menu and pocketed the rest, while another was so desperate to win that she paid the chef from a nearby restaurant to cook the meal, then pass the foil-covered food through the window.

These eccentricities are demolished by voiceover artist Dave Lamb — dubbed the bitchiest man on TV by the tabloids — with a script prepared by David Sayer, the former political journalist and Jonathan Dimbleby’s producer. Indeed, it is Sayer’s political connections that have pulled together Come Dine With Me’s forthcoming election night special — with three MPs chowing down as the polls close — which will lead into a World Cup Wags special once the tournament kicks off.

It’s a staggering rise for a series that started five years ago and was broadcast every weekday at 5pm on Channel 4 but came off air after the success of Deal or No Deal. In 2007 Helen Warner, the new controller of daytime programming, decided to resuscitate the format and put together a prime-time offering. “I don’t think anyone expected it would explode so quickly,” she says, sounding slightly bemused.

“It holds its own against The X Factor, Dancing on Ice and Britain’s Got Talent and the Saturday slot went from hundreds of thousands of viewers to around 3m. At that point international sales went crazy.”

Helen Barratt, 28, a designer from Chester, knows why. “I — and everyone I know — watches it for the moment when things go wrong,” she explains. “And I love it that they’re all so bitchy about each other. I’m normally eating something crap like crumpets in front of it, so it’s especially good when the cooks are talking as though they’re TV chefs — ‘And this is my secret recipe for enchiladas’ — when really they are a drunk hairdresser from Bolton who keeps on dropping the spoon.”

Rarely a show goes by without some culinary catastrophe — which is given extra piquancy in the celebrity specials that have attracted the likes of Bobby Davro, Edwina Currie, David Gest, Donal MacIntyre and Peter Stringfellow. While Caprice shopping in a supermarket reminded fan forums of Ab Fab, a quick Facebook poll found that the viewers’ absolute favourite was Birds of a Feather actress Lesley Joseph roasting a leg of lamb for four hours but finding the meat was still raw, forcing Rodney Marsh, Paul Ross, Abi Titmuss and Linda Lusardi to ransack her kitchen in search of a new main course.

Or was it actually her kitchen? This month Channel 4 was forced to admit that some celebrities had hired homes to host their party. This annoyed viewers such as Gemma Howard, 38, a teacher from Solihull. “The way the guests get to snoop around the host’s home is the best bit,” she says. “It’s worse than any makeover show. There was one where they found a photo in a drawer of the elderly lady host in stockings, suspenders and basque posing suggestively. It was pure car crash TV.”

Dr Jane McCartney, a psychologist, argues that the show plays into a fundamental human emotion that we’d probably like to pretend wasn’t true — schadenfreude.

“We all do the best we can with parenting or cooking and then we see someone pop up on TV thinking they’re something special at this thing we struggle with,” she explains. “So we love it when they fail. Come Dine With Me has parts of all the most successful schadenfreude shows from the past 10 years — makeover programmes, MasterChef, Big Brother, but to top it all off there’s always a liberal amount of alcohol sloshing around — which adds to the sinful pleasure.”

Hence the respectable gentleman who drank so much that by the time he came to his crêpes suzette he couldn’t tell that he was using a green liqueur instead of orange; the host who got so drunk that she fell asleep and the guests had to cook for themselves; or the guest who hated puddings but insisted on trying them and then spitting any mouthful she didn’t like into her handbag. Interestingly, it’s not always the best meal that wins the contestants’ votes and this behaviour is gradually attracting academic attention.

Chris Dillow, an economist and author of The End of Politics: New Labour and the Folly of Managerialism, says the show is a perfect critique of game theory — a series of rules devised by economists to predict rational behaviour in everyday situations. “The optimum strategy for a guest is to score their hosts zero,” he writes. “This would mean the maximum score one’s rival hosts could make would be 20, which in a normal game would not usually be sufficient to win. If everyone knows this, we end up in a Nash equilibrium in which everyone scores zero; but this never happens. Even contestants who claim to want to win score their rivals reasonably. This suggests that norms of fairness overwhelm selfish optimisation.

“The other problem for game theory,” he points out, “is that the four people are strangers. This means the first host is likely to judged heavily on his food, as the guests barely know him. But later hosts are more likely to be judged on personality as well, as by then the four have gotten to know each other. This can cause diners to regret their earlier scores as when Rachel said that, had she known how big an arse Stuart — the first host — was, she would not have scored him so highly.

“Conventional rational-choice economics typically takes preferences as given, and revealed by choice. However, CDWM shows that preferences are sensitive to the order in which options appear, which raises important issues about the nature of rationality and preferences. Watched even in narrow economists’ terms, it is much more interesting than politicians’ waffle about the crisis.”

Perhaps the contestants can afford to play more casually as the prize money is only £1,000. Even though the sum is small beer in game show terms, it has led to the programme’s biggest tear-jerker. During the 2009 series one contestant, Spencer Uren, announced that his sister had cancer and, if he won the competition, he would donate the money to the hospital treating her. Shortly after filming, Spencer was himself diagnosed with cancer and died. His fellow contestants have since started a charity — Come Dine for Spencer — to raise money for Basingstoke and North Hampshire hospital.

Don’t let that fool you into thinking the show has a heart. As Ben SimmondsGooding, a headhunter from west London, explains: “I love Come Dine With Me for the simple reason that it lets you inside the dinner parties of others, lets you then criticise them and generally come back to the fact that your own personal formula of entertainment can’t be beaten. Of course, the problem is our guests are undoubtedly offering an equally savage critique when leaving our house.”