Good news: Blind Date is returning to our screens. Weird news: it won’t be on television, you probably won’t watch it and it may not technically count as Blind Date. But let’s concentrate on the good news first.
On Monday, Disney+ announced three new unscripted TV shows. One is a sort of Made in Chelsea spin-off about parenthood, another sounds like The Kardashians except it has Wayne and Coleen Rooney in it, and the third is the return of Blind Date, which Disney calls the “ultimate dating series”.
No host or release date has been revealed yet, but that doesn’t matter. It’s Blind Date, for crying out loud. Everyone knows Blind Date. A person has to pick the most desirable option from a panel of three strangers who are hidden from view. Once they have matched, they go on holiday and then report back. And that’s it, over and over again.
If that seems slightly staid, that’s because it is. Even in its day, there was something uncomfortably robotic about Blind Date. The dates were chosen through a stilted exchange of scripted lines, and the contestants themselves were so relentlessly chaste you might as well have been watching footage of toddlers visiting a zoo. It was a classic of the terrestrial-era form: “Was it good or was it the only thing on?”

It is also a good example of the changing television landscape. In its prime, when it was presented by the now late Cilla Black, Blind Date was watched by 18.2 million viewers. When that run ended in 2003, the figure had plummeted to 5 million. That was still 3 million more than the number who tuned in for the 2017 revival on Channel 5, hosted by Paul O’Grady. If the new Disney version gets even a quarter of that figure, it will probably be deemed a success.
More pressingly, we now live in a firmly post-Blind Date world. In the years since Cilla ruled the airwaves, the dating show spectrum has burst into a dazzling kaleidoscope. Simply having a brief verbal exchange with some strangers, then spending a long weekend in Benidorm will no longer cut it. In the last 15 years alone, we have had karaoke-based dating shows (Sing Date), sensorily deprived dating shows (Dating in the Dark), neurodiverse dating shows (Love on the Spectrum), dating shows for exhibitionists (Naked Attraction) and dating shows for people who wish that the human-trafficking scene from Taken was a fully immersive entertainment experience (Take Me Out).
This is only the tip of the iceberg. For decades, the format has adopted reality TV with The Bachelor, Love Island and countless others. There is even Married at First Sight, which seems less designed for singletons than for all their judgmentally dismissive friends.

In this landscape, Blind Date looks woefully outdated. Perhaps this is why the new iteration is promising a fleet of changes. To quote the press release: “Our daters will see if for ever love can truly grow as they spend the summer living together, but potential new partners are always lurking behind the wall.” Which does sound like a comprehensive overhaul, dragging the show into the 21st century by lingering on the relationships rather than the very first interaction. It also – almost! – hints that the contestants might be sexually attracted to each other this time around, which will make a change from the Cilla era, which tended to vault from polite conversation straight to marriage.
Then again, this new format has an air of Ship of Theseus about it. What Disney seems to be making has so little in common with the original Blind Date that it doesn’t seem much like Blind Date at all. It sounds a bit like Frankenstein’s monster, with so many ungainly new elements bolted on that it is destined to rise up one day and murder its oppressors. It goes without saying that the new version may be exactly what the current television landscape requires – and that it could end up running as long as the original. But still, what would Cilla think?