Love isn’t just for the young and taut of buttock. That’s the obvious yet still somehow revolutionary premise of My Mum, Your Dad, ITV’s new dating show, in which a bunch of twentysomething children oversee their nervous middle-aged parents’ attempts to find love in a country house stuffed with fellow singletons.
Originally billed as a kind of geriatric Love Island, the first few episodes are shaping up to be something much more interesting, not least because the format is surprisingly kind by the standards of reality TV: think the gentle solidarity of the Bake Off tent, rather than the psychologically twisted Big Brother house. The emphasis is firmly and rather touchingly on the vulnerability of the fiftysomethings venturing uncertainly on to the dating scene, in some cases a good three decades after they thought they’d left all that behind for good.
