Come Dine With Me...

Channel 4 invite you to do Come Dine With Me. Who is invited & what’s your entertainment?

As you may have read, staging a Come Dine With Me is one for my bucket list, though I should clarify that I have no desire to appear on the programme itself. When I say stage, I mean only that I would like to organise a Come Dine With Me circuit with some friends. One day I’ll get round to it...

If I were asked to appear on the real thing, I would decline. I’m not sure I’d make the cut anyway.

I’m too stable and too avoidant of confrontation to make interesting viewing. In fact, I’m too good at defusing confrontation to make interesting viewing. I make a living doing it, and I feel fairly confident that I would be too calm, too polite and too tolerant to warrant televising. Even if I were paired with awful, belligerent, argumentative people.

Essentially, I’m nice and I’m boring and that isn’t what they’re after.

So who would I invite? Some friends -  hosting for strangers selected precisely for their  questionable social skills and bizarre dietary stipulations contingent not upon health needs or tolerance but on their fussiness and need for control?

No thanks.

And celebrities? Whilst in theory, the idea of eating out with Harry Judd, Colton Haynes, Tom Daley and Elliot Tittensor is tremendously exciting and titillating, I have always speculated about meeting your celebrity heroes: What do you actually say?

I recall feeling the same way as an adolescent, about people entering competitions to meet McFly, or go for lunch with Adam Rickitt or whatever. What do you say?

It would be awful!  Mind-numbing!

“HALLO!  I REALLY LIKE YOU!  WE HAVE NOTHING IN COMMON, BUT I LIKE YOU....HURRRRRRRRRHH!”

Just no. 

Adam as I choose to remember him

So I would prefer something competitive and amusing, but that I would actually enjoy.

Just me, good friends, good food and 4 naked men waiting on my every desire.

And entertainment? I’m not sure dinner ever needs entertainment. My best dinner parties have always been those where you end up sitting there drinking wine or cocktails round the table with the final course, chatting away and not noticing you’ve been talking for seven hours.

But if things went wrong, I’d probably reflexively resort to SingStar.  We never got over SingStar.

And what guests don’t want to bang out some ‘I Touch Myself’ after a bottle of wine each?

What can I get you sir?

A Gratuitous Bumshot please.