Can’t get a date for love nor money? Tried Tinder, OKCupid and every other dating app? Well, Naked Attraction (Monday, Channel 4) guarantees you’ll have your kit off at first sight. In this new dating show, contestants choose their partners based solely on body parts – breasts, buttocks, penises and vaginas – and there’s no pixelation to pander to your prudishness. You’ll be watching through your hands.
The six prospective dates stand naked inside colour-coded opaque boxes. You can just make out their silhouettes, like some creepy sci-fi experiment. The contenders are revealed “bit by wobbly bit”, and our contestant must whittle them down to one ideal body. And before the contestant makes their final choice, they have to get naked too.
To dress it all up in some kind of legitimacy, presenter Anna Richardson regularly digresses into pseudoscientific facts about human sexuality (“studies suggest” that women prefer girth over length); the programme bangs on about how “the clothes we wear can get in the way”; and the prospective dates keep telling themselves that “this is an empowering experience”, “I feel like I’ve achieved something massive here” and “this is good”.
It’s not. It’s a bunch of naked people having their scrotums scrutinised and their vulvas value-judged. Whether they’re desperate for a date or just desperate to be on TV is hard to tell. And whether true love blossoms on this nude tube is impossible to care about. You’re just hoping they’ll hurry up and make their choice so you don’t have to watch any more.
I was all ready to sneer at The Collectors (Tuesday, RTÉ One), a one-hour documentary about six Irish people who collect such things as Barbies, Dinky cars, comics and Coca-Cola memorabilia. It seemed the perfect opportunity to snigger smugly at sad people with no lives. But then they floored me with their humanity.
These were not sad people at all,though some of them had sad stories to tell. You’d think their collection would be a prison, but it actually freed some of them from loneliness and widened their social circle, and allowed others to inject a bit of fun and frivolity into their lives.
Glenda Taylor collects Barbie dolls, and is planning to have several of them as guests at her wedding. She comes across as bubbly and outgoing, not the socially inept introvert you might expect. Lillian O’Donoghue is a happy mum who happens to like the red-and-white livery of Coca-Cola (“well, they are the Cork colours”). For unemployed bachelor Martin Bolger, collecting die-cast model cars and trucks fills a gap in his mind that would otherwise be troubled with negative thoughts.
Robert Glick has cystic fibrosis and is largely housebound, and his valuable comic book collection keeps him busy – and provides a financial buffer should he and his wife, Liz, need quick cash. Helena Scully’s porcelain doll collection looks a bit creepy at first, but then we meet her favourite doll, who wears a dress her daughter Anne-Marie wore as a child. Anne-Marie died of leukaemia at the age of 19 in 2000.
I don’t want to sneer now – I want to cry.
Long, long ago (well, April 2015) a group of powerful leaders from Dublin, peeved that the Wild Atlantic Way was getting all the tourist action, came up with a new tourism initiative: the Ancient East (although, confusingly, it also encompassed the midlands and the south). Now they needed a brave road warrior to explore the region, and – lo! – John Creedon was up for it. “I’ve done the west. Now I’m doing the rest!” he announced in the first episode of Creedon’s Epic East (Sunday, RTÉ One).
With 17 counties to wade through – basically, everything east and south of the Shannon – Creedon sets out in his trusty VW camper van, the Sean Van Bocht, his only companion an epic soundtrack by John Spillane. But Creedon is on another mission: to find out what it means to be Irish. Is it in our DNA? Is it in our souls? Or is it in the Irish propensity for creating makey-uppy tourism entities?
He visits the megalithic site at Loughcrew (the lesser-known cousin of Newgrange); lights a paschal fire on the Hill of Slane; searches for the spirit of poet Patrick Kavanagh in Co Monaghan in the company of comedian Oliver Callan; brews stone-age beer; visits a “jumping wall”; and joins a re-enactment of the Táin on the Cooley Mountains in Co Louth.
I don’t yet hear phones madly ringing at Fáilte Ireland as tourists scramble to book their holidays, but maybe they’re being drowned out by that epic soundtrack.
At the end of this leg, Creedon hasn’t unravelled the great mystery of Irishness, but he does note that “above all else, we still haven’t lost that great intangible, the craic”. Sure aren’t we great altogether?
As Top Gear trundles off towards the scrapyard, a new assortment of metallic machines has moved in to take its place. Robot Wars (BBC Two, Sunday) returns with a new array of deadly droids ready to do battle. Yes, we’ve been shunted back to the 1990s with a metallic clang. This time it’s an Irish takeover: Dara Ó Briain and Angela Scanlon are the new presenters on this rebooted, retooled and recharged show, and they totally own it.
The format is largely unchanged: teams of amateur engineers pit their robotic inventions against each other in a purpose-built arena in Glasgow, in front of a bloodthirsty (or should that be oilthirsty?) crowd. Jonathan Pearce returns to deliver his inimitable blow-by-blow commentary.
It’s pointless, dumb and metal-shreddingly good fun. The robots have names that sound like heavy metal bands (Terrorhurtz, Behemoth, Kill-E-Crank-E) and the original “house robots” (Sir Killalot, Matilda, Dead Metal and Shunt) have been upgraded to be bigger and more brutal than ever. They still rely on old-fashioned mechanical stuff: sawblades, axes, and anything else with a capacity to mangle, mutilate and dismember.
It’s like watching a cockfight, but with more moving parts. This will sate anyone’s nerdy appetite for destruction.
There’s something a tad cartoonish about Vice Principals (Tuesday, Sky Atlantic), HBO’s savage new comedy series about two warring VPs at an American high school. One, played by Danny McBride from Eastbound & Down, wears a cheesy tank top; the other (Walton Goggins) sports a ridiculous dickie bow.
When the current principal (a cameo by Bill Murray) retires to look after his dying wife, the stage is set for a battle royale between the venal VPs. The two fight like, well, naughty schoolboys, and although this first episode provides a couple of good, cringy moments (McBride does a Kanye West on a student as she sings a tribute to the departing principal), we hope it escalates into shock and awe pretty soon.
ONES TO WATCH: LET THE GAMES BEGIN AND BREXIT BE DAMNED
The botched preparations are over, and now it’s over to Rio for feathers, fireworks and a fortnight of sporting action: Rio 2016 opening ceremony (Friday, 8.30pm, BBC1; 11.30pm, RTÉ2)
Never mind the political pundits and academic analysts: check out what the couch-bound regulars have to say about the UK’s exit from the EU on Gogglebox Brexit (Wednesday, 9pm, Channel 4).
