“Makes your skin tingle and your bones creak” – Come Dine with Me: Teenagers is the Boring Show No One Needs | Come have dinner with me

IIf there’s one tried-and-true formula when it comes to television, it’s this: When you run out of ideas, bring in the kids. This formula is why everything from MasterChef to The Great British Bake Off to Taskmaster have, at some point, served a starter version. Now it’s time to come have dinner with me and join the gang.

Everyone said, which is probably a bit late. It took five years for MasterChef to introduce a starter version, and only one for Bake Off. Meanwhile, “Come Dine with Me” is 20 years old. To call it long in the tooth would be a great disservice to long teeth.

Come Dine with Me: Teens — because that’s the title of the new series — drives this point even further. Participating contestants are between 16 and 19 years old. This means they are all younger than Come Dine With Me. None of them know what it is to live in a world where Come Dine With Me hasn’t been invented yet. If that doesn’t make your skin sag and your bones creak, I’m not sure what will.

Why did it take so long to release a teen version of Come Dine With Me? Maybe the answer, you think, had something to do with the way it was presented. The thing that always sets Come Dine With Me apart from the army of imitators is Dave Lamb, who doesn’t so much narrate the episodes as audibly roll his eyes over them. At its purest, Come Dine With Me is raw footage of people doing their best to cook a delicious meal while Dave Lamb calls them all idiots. And while that might be funny when your cook is a self-consciously goofy guy from Tonbridge, it’s less funny when he’s an innocent teenager.

Fortunately, on the basis of Monday’s first episode (of five; a longer series is planned in the near future), Lamb has eased his fatigue a bit. He’s not an attack dog here, and although this is age appropriate for the contestants, you can still occasionally hear him choke on his instincts to be sarcastic.

For example, one of the young contestants is Ben, a gym bunny who gets used to kissing his muscles when there’s a camera on him. If Ben had been 35, there was a very good chance Lamb would have ripped him to shreds. But he’s a teenager, and even when he admits that he thinks beef Wellington is some kind of shoegaze (an open target if there ever was one), the best Lamb can do in response is a choked “I see your logic.”

However, he was probably just warming up. The fun of Come Dine With Me was always watching it develop over the course of the week, with everyone’s quirks and flaws becoming more apparent as the episodes went on. By Friday, there’s a very good chance the teens will be pregnancy tired. There were even signs of that on Monday, with Lamb shouting “shut up” when two contestants revealed they had never had soup before.

But the biggest problem is how boring it is to watch. You can attribute this to the age of the contestants. They are, after all, blank slates with nothing interesting ever happening to them; They didn’t have enough time to build up the levels of resentment necessary to unleash a “What a sad little life, Jane” outburst.

But maybe it’s more than that. The figure had probably just been petrified. This is far from the first spin-off that Come Dine With Me has attempted. During the day, Come to Dine With Me led to prime time Come Dine With Me, which in turn gave birth to the celebrities Come Dine With Me, then couples to Come Dine With Me, and then Come Dine With Me: the professionals. For a while, we had a date with me, which was probably just a gif of Dave Lamb eating himself.

Come Dine with Me: Teens may finally spark life. One of the students he took in this week is a catering student who dresses up as Elvis, has no working knowledge of popular culture and brings party tubs everywhere he goes. With a little persuasion and creative editing, he might turn into a Come Dine With Me eccentric for the ages. But right now, it doesn’t seem likely. Let’s get a four out of 10 in the back of a cab when you’re not listening.

Come Dine with Me: Teenagers is on Channel 4 now.

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