Who’s Doing the Dishes? is the best daytime TV in years
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Version 0 of 1. Compared to the rest of the schedules, daytime TV has always had its own separate ecosystem. It’s a world were iteration trumps innovation, where the same few building blocks – DIY, cookery, Dominic Littlewood, something to do with antiques – are endlessly recycled and reconstituted into newer, slicker formats. ITV’s new contender Who’s Doing the Dishes? is emblematic of this evolutionary quirk, since it throws in a bit of everything, up to and including the kitchen sink. Stripped across the week at 4pm, Who’s Doing the Dishes? sees ex-Westlife member Brian McFadden escorting four blindfolded civilians to a celebrity’s home. While the unwashed have a nosey round the house for context clues, the celebrity in question prepares dinner, embedding cryptic hints to their identity in the names of each course – literally, a signature dish. (The ghost of Sid James would presumably have appreciated Towie’s Amy Childs serving up “a lovely pear salad”.) If the diners manage to correctly identify their host, they win £500 and the celebrity has to do the washing up. If they get it wrong, the civilians have to roll up their sleeves and get scrubbing. If that makes it sound suspiciously like Come Dine With Me meets Through the Keyhole that’s because it is clearly intended to be Come Dine With Me meets Through the Keyhole. But somewhere in that cut-and-shunt approach to commissioning, a little magic happened. Perhaps ITV front-loaded the first week with tenderloin, but Who’s Doing the Dishes? mines a surprising amount of humour, pathos and sheer WTF from the gulf between each celebrity’s self-confidence and the self-sabotaging deductive processes of their guests as they trawl through imperfect memories for candidates. This is an arena where the phrase “what about Chas and Dave?” carries a certain profundity, and even the late Mike Reid of EastEnders can be cautiously floated as a possibility. It’s like the anti-Sherlock. If the actual guessing part can sometimes seem a little undercooked, McFadden’s enthusiastic interactions with each star have thrown up candid and surprisingly entertaining vignettes. He cannily steered his former mentor Louis Walsh toward a signed photograph of Simon Cowell posing moodily with a cigarette to try and get a reaction. Walsh was happy to oblige. “Look at him, he’s so camp!” he chuckled. “He looks like Oscar Wilde!” There was also the strange sight of McFadden and Claire from Steps comparing misinterpretations of their historic dance routines for Tragedy and Flying Without Wings, a moment that could have been unbearably sad, but ended up being weirdly celebratory. Even better, this was just preamble for McFadden to try and reconnect with Claire while wearing a novelty Santa Claus apron and waving a large kitchen knife. “Did you know I used to fancy you?” he said. “You were my first crush when I was a teenager.” Claire silently continued to prepare her “pop prawn and pineapple cocktail”, but McFadden remained undeterred. “Did you fancy me or was it just a one-way thing?” The episode ended with McFadden wearing Claire’s bikini from the Love’s Got a Hold of My Heart video. Valuable clue for the bemused diners, or belated attempt at closure? Incredibly, McFadden is the ingredient that keeps the show at a rolling boil. He’s breezy, hard-working and a gifted mimic, throwing himself into unflattering impressions of contestants. He does the voiceover in the same irreverent, rat-a-tat style pioneered by Dave Lamb on Come Dine With Me, and comes over as genuinely quick-witted. It’s a revelatory performance. Who’s Doing the Dishes? is McFadden’s masterpiece: cometh the scour, cometh the man. It helps that each episode is from a technical viewpoint state-of-the-art, crammed with every editing trick and soundtrack gimmick cribbed from its successful forebears. If the term “daytime TV” used to be synonymous with slightly ramshackle, undemanding programming attuned to the languid circadian rhythms of hungover students and the retired, it’s now a hyper-competitive arena of mechanical oneupmanship, a Hunger Games for image and sound editors. A typical Who’s Doing the Dishes? episode will contain multiple catch-up montages, stylised slo-mo, fake video rewinds, cartoonish on-screen graphics and at least one instance of the twinkling “ting” that symbolises perfect white teeth. Meanwhile, the rapid-fire soundbed chops up chunks of Nelly Furtado, the Troggs, the A-Team theme, screeching strings from Psycho and, inevitably, Westlife – a mixing masterclass that would have David Guetta scratching his head. These are TV ninjas operating at the peak of their powers, all in service of a sudsy guessing game. We’re only one week down, with five more to go, and it’s Toyah on Wednesday. Can’t wait. What’s your favourite daytime TV show? Let us know below |