Come Dine With Me Since its beginnings in the January of 2005 a television program, broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK, has become cult viewing for around three million people. The set-up is simple. Every week a group consisting of four people host a dinner party, in their own home, each entertaining the remaining three on consecutive nights. They must use their culinary skills to feed and impress the three guests, or rather contestants as a £1000 prize is at stake, while at the same time laying on some form of entertainment to aide the evenings proceedings. This may be in the form of a lecture on cheese production, an antipodean wine tasting or a pole dancing competition. Anything goes. The guests offer a critique on the proceedings, they tour the home of the host snooping in cupboards and wardrobes. Then they give a score out of ten. At the end of the week the host with highest score wins the prize. The food tends to be a nightmare. The menus are frequently over complicated, with the items never well prepared. The hosts frequently serve dishes which they have never cooked before. Madness. The real appeal of the program however is in the casting of the guests. People whom would never normally been seen dead together are forced to entertain. Made to spend an evening in the same room. Descriptions are used rather than names to describe these guests. The ‘plain talking woman’, the ‘aged night-club owner’ or the ‘eccentric barrister’. The efforts of the host are sneered at by the narrator, who uses an air of detached superiority to recount the evenings events. Mocking, sneering and scornful. Superb. This program is hilarious entertainment, rebellious food production. Great stuff.