Come Dine With Me

Well, I couldn't. Because I have a devastating addiction to this programme, to which good weather, fresh air and real life must come second. Plus, I will never have the nerve, or the required number of plates, to host my own dinner party. So it’s much more fulfilling to watch other people mess up theirs.

Come Dine With Me is a week long contest between 5 strangers, all of whom must devise and prepare their own menu and attempt to lay on a suitably smooth evening for the other 4. The food, the conversation, the pattern on the tablecloth, the sheen on the cutlery – all will be noted, scrutinized and brutally judged. The guests then score their host out of ten for the evening (usually in the back of a taxi when they’ve consumed so much wine it’s slopping out of their earholes). They won’t want to give away too many points, because they will be depleting their own chances of scoring the thousand pound prize. So even if their host greets them at the door with a brass band, gives them each an individual Indian head massage, has raised, slaughtered and glazed the meat they are serving with molten gold – they will undoubtedly lose marks for forgetting the napkin rings.

Amongst these 5 strangers will lurk a wheat allergy, a personality disorder, a snob, an inferiority complex and a lush.

Wheat allergy will moan consistently throughout the week about the other contestants disregard for their dietary needs, despite failing to inform anybody of these beforehand.

Personality disorder will be taking part to make some new friends - as the week progresses, we will learn why these attempts have hitherto been unsuccessful. Personality disorder will probably die alone, clutching a cold Cup-a-Soup.

Snob will be delightful for the first five minutes, and then launch into a tirade about the host’s atrocious taste in wallpaper the second they leave the room to fetch them a drink. Snob will continue in this vein for the entire evening. Nothing will be good enough for them, but they won’t just come out and say it. At least not to anybody’s face.

Inferiority complex will attempt to do something horribly complicated with their menu, fail and be on the phone to the Samaritans as soon as the guests have given up and gone to the chippy.

And the lush will be marvelous company, but fail to cook anything that anybody will actually want to eat.

To point out the culinary mishaps and sometimes inexplicable behavior of the contestants, who can find the constant scrutiny of cameras coupled with the pressure of entertaining does rather strange things to them, is narrator and cynic Dave Lamb. He doesn’t miss a trick. Or a tic. He won’t let our contestants get away with using ready-made filo pastry. He will announce this misdemeanor repeatedly. I think what he really wants is to be a contestant, but like me, he just doesn’t have the requisite number of place settings.

Come Dine With Me, weekdays at 5.30pm, Channel 4