In the opening moments of The Golden Bachelor, the newest addition to the US reality show franchise, a dapper man who could be in his late 50s straightens his tie before picking up a hearing aid and discreetly fitting it behind one ear. This is Gerry, who, we learn, lost his wife several years ago and is soon depicted sobbing unrestrainedly in a way that, were this a crime drama, would send him straight to the top of the suspects list. Instead Gerry, at 72, is the first pensioner to lead America’s biggest and longest-running dating show. “How lucky would I be,” he asks, with exquisite delivery of concept, “to find a second true love in my lifetime?”
Dating shows don’t tell us much about the world we live in except via the back door of whom they leave out. In the US, The Bachelor – in which a single man dates a pool of women, ostensibly with the intention of choosing a wife – has been running since 2002, and didn’t have a Black male lead until 2021. Occasionally, the producers accidentally book a closeted gay man who comes out after filming (Colton Underwood, season 23) but no one has ever put a gay bachelor in on purpose. In the UK, the closest the dating show landscape has come to pushing the boundaries is My Mum, Your Dad, an ITV1 show hosted by Davina McCall that launched earlier this year and featured adult children nominating their middle-aged single parents, and the hot young gay men of BBC 3’s I Kissed a Boy, fronted by Dannii Minogue.
