BRIAN VINER: Can TV sink any lower? It claims to be progressive and truthful. In fact, Channel 4's new naked dating show is stupid and degrading voyeurism from what's meant to be a public service broadcaster

By BRIAN VINER FOR THE BE INFORMED

PUBLISHED: 23:14 GMT, 26 July 2016 | UPDATED: 06:28 GMT, 27 July 2016

From Big Brother to Sex Box, the world of TV is always looking for new lows. And this week Channel 4 succeeded.

Thousands of viewers complained on Twitter and media guardians branded Naked Attraction — an uncensored nude dating show — the ‘worst programme ever shown on TV’. Broadcasting watchdog Ofcom has already received 24 complaints about nudity.

A spokesman for MediaWatch UK said: ‘This has to be the worst programme ever shown on television, there is nothing to recommend it.’

Thousands of viewers complained on Twitter and media guardians branded Naked Attraction — an uncensored nude dating show, pictured — the ‘worst programme ever shown on TV’

 Norman Wells, of the Family Education Trust, accused Channel 4 of ‘grossly irresponsible broadcasting’ and viewers labelled it ‘creepy’ and a ‘new low for British TV’.

A spokesman for Channel 4 said last night: ‘This is a light-hearted and appropriately scheduled series which aims to demystify the rules of sexual attraction for the [dating app] Tinder generation.

Here, the Mail’s film critic Brian Viner gives his queasy assessment.

Sadly, we will never know what Cilla Black would have made of it. But there’s really no avoiding the dispiriting conclusion that Channel 4’s latest reality show Naked Attraction, a nude and heavily sexualised version of Blind Date, the Saturday tea-time institution that dear old Cilla hosted for nearly 18 years, marks a spectacular new low for British television.

Of course, the bar could hardly be lower than it already is. Already this year we have been subjected to ITV2’s Love Island, in which one couple copulated in broad daylight while other contestants commented on their love-making technique.

But this is worse. From every angle, but especially the one that allows participants to assess the sexual organs of their six would-be dates, Naked Attraction is utterly ghastly, and depressingly degrading

Daily Mail film critic Brian Viner calls the show 'a nude and heavily sexualised version of Blind Date... [which] marks a spectacular new low for British television'

In each two-part programme, a pair of contestants get to appraise the six people vying ‘in their birthday suits’ for approval.

Each date stands stark naked in a box, while a screen is gradually raised to reveal them front and back ‘bit by wobbly bit’, as presenter Anna Richardson puts it.

The contestants then reject the dates one by one for purely physical reasons mainly attached to their genitalia. I use the word ‘attached’ advisedly; there is an awful lot of body-piercing on show. As well as, inevitably in this day and age, disfigurement by tattoo.

When only two potential dates are left, they parade naked while the contestant runs the rule over them, and while this doesn’t quite happen literally, in Monday’s opening programme one aspiring suitor was rejected because his penis was too big.

That was the moment when I had to remind myself of Channel 4’s original remit, to which it still makes a vague pretence of adhering.

Its founding fathers, who included the great actor and director Richard Attenborough, set up Channel 4 in 1982 to be ‘innovative, experimental and distinctive’.

But it is safe to say that the concept behind Naked Attraction isn’t even remotely what was meant by those high-minded words; Lord Attenborough will be another wincing from beyond the grave.

So why is Naked Attraction worse than even Love Island? There are so many reasons. To start with, because it is such a horrible mutation of a much-loved family show.

And second, because it so disingenuously affects to be truthful and honest

The premise allows contestants to appraise the six people vying for a date ‘in their birthday suits’ 

The real truth is this is nothing more than an exercise in old-fashioned voyeurism, pure and simple, yet it pretends to be broad-minded and progressive.

On Monday, the first contestant, a 32-year-old woman called Aina, selected as her date a man with a prosthetic leg. Fair enough.

The second contestant, a 24-year-old female bisexual called Mal, then admired a significantly overweight woman for her ‘gorgeous, beautiful shape . . . very Botticelli’. Again, fair enough, except that the woman was duly rejected for being — no euphemism could possibly disguise it — fat.

The show’s message, loudly amplified by Richardson (the only person who doesn’t get naked, since the contestants eventually have to strip off, before striding off hand in hand with their dates), is that as two people weigh each other up as candidates for a possible relationship, clothes are a distraction, an irrelevance. Apparently, we’re all only interested in what’s underneath.

But in a series about full exposure the fundamental weakness of this notion was well and truly exposed when Mal and her eventual choice, Rebecca, reported back after two weeks of dating.

Clearly, there was no romantic spark at all. If their body language screeched anything as they sat alongside each other on a sofa, fully clothed, it was that they could hardly stand each other.

Everything Mal had so admired about the naked Rebecca — her height, her curves, her gorgeous brown eyes, her (heaven help us) fascinating pale areolae — had plainly counted for nothing over conversation in a wine bar.

When only two potential dates are left, they parade naked while the contestant runs the rule over them

So the idea of ‘dating in reverse’ — ie starting with nakedness, and moving on to dinner — doesn’t even work.

Yet there are many other reasons to be appalled by Naked Attraction. At least Love Island was shunted to ITV2. But Channel 4 is still one of our main terrestrial channels.

What kind of nation have we become when our principal summer sport, Test cricket, cannot be seen live on so-called public-service TV (Channel 4 is publicly owned but commercially funded), yet a shameless, semi-jokey examination of genitalia is a mainstream alternative to the News At Ten?

What is most dispiriting about all this is that the show degrades not just those taking part, not just Richardson — who keeps dropping sexual and physiological facts in a blatant attempt to give this voyeuristic nonsense some kind of scientific credibility — and not just Channel 4.

No, it degrades all of us. For if we are what we eat, so, to an extent, we also are what we watch.

We get the TV that the production companies in their trendy steel-and-chrome offices, and the executives who commission their supposedly brilliant ideas, think we want.

I grew up at a time when Mary Whitehouse, the head of the National Viewers’ And Listeners’ Association and the nation’s best-known moral crusader, was frequently and loudly ridiculed.

But in a way we could do with such a spirited campaigner again, if only to remind us that shows such as Naked Attraction aren’t nearly as modern and liberating as those who make and broadcast them think they are.

The real truth is this is nothing more than an exercise in old-fashioned voyeurism, pure and simple, yet it pretends to be broad-minded and progressive, notes Viner

Miss World was an indefensible festival of condescension not only towards women but also towards developing nations and racial minorities (Miss South Africa was white; Miss Africa South was black). I don’t mind admitting that we all loved it. ‘Oh yes, now she’s not bad, not bad at all,’ my dad would say from his Parker Knoll armchair, of Miss Denmark. ‘No, she’s knock-kneed,’ my mother would counter. ‘Wait until you see her in a swimsuit.’

The three of us would then wait excitedly for the swimwear stage of the proceedings and usually my mother, who for some reason had an uncanny eye for knock-kneed women, would be proved correct. From the waist down, the bare-legged Miss Denmark resembled the letter X.

Now, of course, we all know better. We know that old-fashioned beauty pageants, in which the contestants were actually required to turn round and show their behinds to the overwhelmingly male judges, demeaned women. The 1970 Miss World contest was disrupted by ‘Women’s Lib’ protesters who suddenly emerged from the audience and threw flour bombs at the host, Bob Hope.

At the time, many of us were rather cross with them. But almost half a century later, we’ve all taken their message on board.

'It degrades all of us,' writes Viner. 'For if we are what we eat, so, to an extent, we also are what we watch'

That’s another reason why Naked Attraction diminishes television, and our culture in general. It fully deserves that old slur about beauty pageants: it really is nothing but a meat market.

True, it can’t so easily be accused of rampant sexism, since it’s men and women alike who parade for the delectation of the judges (by which I mean the one judge on the show and all the others at home, assuming there will be any audience left by the end of the series).

But aren’t we all supposed to know these days that it is offensively superficial to judge anyone purely on the basis of what they look like, let alone to make them turn around so they can have their bottoms assessed? And speaking of bottoms, how much further down the barrel can Channel 4 scrape?

Will they next conceive a show in which contestants are actually allowed to cop a feel of these naked patsies? If so, that won’t propel us backwards in time merely to 1970, but all the way to 1770, when slaves were bought according to the firmness of their flesh.

In the increasingly desperate grab for ratings, can we rule out a grab for a male appendage? I suspect not.

In the meantime, we should remind ourselves that full-frontal nudity is commonplace on television these days.

The name Versailles, which once evoked a palace or maybe a treaty, now summons images of Louis XIV and his entire court having energetic sex in the altogether, thanks to the controversial BBC2 serial.

So it’s not as though Naked Attraction is showing us anything that isn’t already flaunted, pretty much every night of the TV week.

However, context is all. Some of us might lament the way in which sex and nudity is used to sell TV drama, but it’s still drama, still make-believe. Naked Attraction is a different matter. Hard though it is to remember when reality TV seemed fun and novel rather than exploitative and stale, there was a time when it was.

There’s nothing clever about this show. In fact, it is pathetically, irredeemably, intolerably stupid.

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