Television review: Channel 4’s mating season

Channel 4 is deep into its summer of love. It’s having a Mating Season and — unusually for the network — it’s not all about sex. Instead, it’s about those fluttery butterflies that occur before the birds and the bees come in, when two people meet for the first time and get to know each other. Not mating then, but dating, which is scarier. When you watch Dates, it seems scarier still. The drama series is about ‘the social minefield’ of modern dating, and what a minefield it is. Ex-escorts, closet gay bankers, Cantonese lesbians — there’s the lot.

The first episode, about two very different people on a blind date, was quite intriguing. But I got sidetracked. The female character, Mia, looked disconcertingly like Samantha Cameron. Furthermore, her date’s name was David! Does Channel 4 know something we don’t about how the Camerons met? But then, the on-screen David was a lorry driver with an authentic-sounding northern accent, so the similarities ended there. Also, when the TV couple finished their meal and headed for the exit, they didn’t leave a child behind, so no, on the whole, probably not the Camerons.

Anyway, Dates is brought to us by the creator of Skins, and is the kind of unexpected thing you’d expect. The show is full of sharp one-liners and angsty people with a certain city slickness. But all that smartness gets wearying after a while. It’s like dating a man too aware of his cleverness — you wait for the repartee to turn into conversation, but it never does. Even Mia’s character, played by Oona Chaplin, who does that vulnerability-under-cockiness thing very well, became grating as the series wore on. In one episode she insisted on tagging along with her date, a doctor, after he gets an emergency call.