Home where the heart-throb is

By FRANCES GRANT

Once upon a time your house was your castle, a domain or preserve where you were free to kick off the shoes and be yourself. Now it's supposed to be a showcase, artfully designed to score a date. Your mating success taste depends on your taste in interior decoration.

New reality show House Dates (TV3, 8.30pm) throws open the doors of the contestants' homes, letting the cameras in to show the potential date and the world what they're made of - or rather what their furnishings, clothes and cleaning products have to say about them.

Yes, here's a show to add another level to the towering superficiality by which we judge people in our consumerist society. You are your address, your decor and your CD collection. House Dates, you suspect, is not the kind of show which would go down well with the Malaysian Prime Minister. After watching it, even those most wounded by his recent comments on the parlous state of western culture might have to concede he has a point.

As a dating show, this does have a strong Kiwi flavour. Not for us the intrigue and international ambition of an American product like the chateau-based, rabidly gold-digging Joe Millionaire. Or the cattle calls of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette.

This show combines dating with the national obsession - real estate and open homes - and seems to throw in a kind of Jamie Oliver faux-spontaneous cooking segment at the finish.

In last week's debut of this "dating show with a difference", as our breathless presenter Julie White introduced it, flight attendant Sheree got to poke through three blokes' dwellings and on the strength of her findings pick out one for a date.

The show, we are informed, strives for scientific accuracy in the person of psychologist John Aiken, who does a parallel assessment of the homes and the personalities involved.

What can decor reveal about someone's personality? After a stroll around Sheree's home, picking up family photographs, he came up with this insight into her character, "family is obviously important".

As you can see, this isn't a show likely to deliver much by way of suspense or surprising plot development.

As an anthropological study, however, it's a nightmare of expectations. What was 31-year-old Sheree looking for in a man? "Someone similar to myself ... real strength of character, assertive, extroverted, ambitious, motivated, all those sorts of things ... fun-loving, outdoorsy, adventurous, I need a man I can't walk all over."

Wow, the house inspections hadn't even started and you were praying for a safe escape for their probably all-too human owners.

Like most in the reality genre, House Dates relies on humiliation as its chief entertainment factor. But in an egalitarian Kiwi spirit, the embarrassment cuts both ways.

While Sheree rummaged through wardrobes sizing up clothes with disparaging cliches about "short man's syndrome", the male suffering the inspection at least could get in such withering stereotypical retorts as, "she's beefier than I thought she would be".

Some responses, however, have a Downunder charm: "I hope she doesn't think big TV, small other bits and pieces," worried one of the male hopefuls.

The most interesting aspect of House Dates, however, is the nattily dressed Aiken, a kind of Simon Barnett of psychologists who looks to have some intriguing house-hygiene issues of his own. I recommend to the makers that he be allowed to steal the show.