Four weddings, four babies, one pair of lost knickers: celebrating 10 years of Blind date

Blind date blogger the Guyliner goes behind the scenes of the Guardian column – and finds out what happened next on five of his favourite dates

Did Saturdays even exist before the Blind date column? Not as far as I’m concerned. The start of the weekend was a joyless desert until, in 2009, Weekend magazine started sending two hapless (my words) strangers out for dinner in the hope that three courses, a bottle of house white and the terror of appearing in a national newspaper would be the accelerant a romantic spark needs to go full inferno.

I have been obsessed with Blind date for most of its 10-year existence. Its simplicity is deceptive: what the daters say leaves plenty of room for interpretation. On the surface, the questions are formulaic – somewhere between inane smalltalk at a stranger’s house party and the sexless interrogation of a dietary questionnaire from your GP. But in the context of the column, they are traps – and I love to see the participants fall right in, revealing themselves via the short aside that they shared a pudding with their date. And let’s not forget that score out of 10. Brutal to have adults rate one another, you might say. Delicious, I say.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2NITYEG