Meet Lucy and George, a couple from Worthing whose four-year relationship has lost its oomph. Having long ago ceased swinging from the chandeliers, their life together is now shaped by shopping lists and laundry. There was a time, recalls Lucy, when George’s texts would make her stomach go funny. “When he texts me now it’s: ‘Can you pick some milk up on the way home?’” she says, dolefully. “I don’t want to be one of them couples that’s stuck in a rut.”
While there is no problem here that a milk-delivery service wouldn’t fix, watching a float on its morning rounds doesn’t make for action-packed TV. So instead we have Hello Stranger (Tuesday, 10pm, Channel 4), a show in which hypnotist Aaron Calvert eradicates Lucy and George’s memories of one another and then sends them on a series of blind dates, the last of which is with each other. The suspense, such as it is, lies in whether they will fall in love all over again or hightail it into the sunset with someone new.
Hello Stranger bills itself as “a dating show with a twist”, which suggests something surprising and silly, like taking your dad along on a first date, or turning up dressed as Big Bird. A “twist” certainly doesn’t bring to mind a young person having four years of memories wiped clean and being sent off, all malleable and stupid, on a date with a stranger who knows more about them than they do. Just when you thought the 21st-century dating show had already plumbed all available depths, here’s one that causes its participants to literally lose their minds.
Scores of couples turn up to take part but, we are told, only 30% of people are susceptible to hypnotism. Would that some laughter had been wrung from this dispiriting set-up by picking some who were more resistant. We could have seen Lance from Detectorists quibbling over whether, as someone who burns easily, it’s wise to imagine lying on a sandy beach when he could lie on the carpet in his flat instead. In the event, we get a roomful of fame-hungry nitwits putting their trust in a “medically trained” Derren Brown-in-waiting.
Nobody emerges smelling of roses here: not Lucy and George who, we learn, are vloggers who document their lives online and – by their own admission – offer up a glamourised version of their existence for the benefit of followers, hence their real-life malaise. Not Calvert, whose shtick, according to his website, marks “a distinct departure from traditional ‘cluck-like-a-chicken’ comedy hypnotism”; clearly he is no tacky entertainer, as evidenced by his keenness to participate in a naff television dating show. And certainly not Lucy and George’s dates, either. Among those are Dom, a model who is unfazed by the fact that Lucy is in a trance (“I love a challenge, so I’m in it to win it”), and beauty therapist Jess, who blankly sips her coffee as Calvert briefly renders George unconscious for a hypnosis “top-up”. Why these charming singletons haven’t already been snapped up is truly a mystery.
Next week: a dating show where candidates put their best foot forward after necking two tabs of acid and a litre of tequila. Well why not? No one said finding love was easy.