Jo Thornely recaps First Dates Australia episode five
BREE is probably smart, switched on, driven and hilarious, but on First Dates last night, we could only notice one thing.
WELCOME to the First Dates restaurant, where everybody should just date the barman.
Having seen five episodes so far, I’m actually becoming a dating expert. Thusly, I have some advice for each of the couples tonight.
STOP FIDDLING WITH YOUR HAIR
Mark is an adorable Englishman with an obsessive Home & Away fixation. Phew, lucky he wasn’t fixated on a show from another network, right?
Mark wants a blonde that looks good in a bikini.
Blonde journalism student Bree’s dress is marginally larger than a bikini, and she’s probably smart, switched on, driven and hilarious.
I say ‘probably’, because I really only noticed one thing about Bree.
Mark falls instantly in love with exact-Home-&-Away-character-replica Bree, but initially Bree seems distracted by her heavy hair-adjustment schedule.
Using all her journalisms, she figures out that Mark is from England, executing a perfect Introductory Bar-Side Flick.
When Mark fakes fluency in French to woo Bree, she masters the Head Tilt Fringe Cradle.
They emulate each other’s accents. He tells her he hopes to be a fireman and she approves that decision with a minimum of three of her organs. He asks coyly if she’s ever had an English boyfriend. The hair-fiddling continues throughout, and by this stage there must be a hairball the size of a kelpie under the table.
They do have a sneaky pash though, and agree to a second date. Maybe they can co-parent a kelpie hairball and call it Alf Stewart?
TRY TO KEEP THINGS UPBEAT
Kris is the nicest person in the universe. She fell in love young, married young, had children young, cared for her husband with cancer young, and became a widow young. She single-handedly raised her two teenagers, and now she’s finally doing something for herself.
It’s a touching story and a gorgeous reason to be dating again 13 years later, but admittedly it doesn’t make for particularly upbeat dinner conversation.
Maybe fitness coach Adam will be just the cheerful ticket!
Oh. Adam’s parents both died of cancer.
Against all odds the conversation turns chipper when they talk about travel, and Kris’s eyes sparkle as she says she’d love to know that she has the chance. Now that her kids are older and she doesn’t want any more.
See, it’s really important to Adam to have and raise children. He asks Kris if she’s ever thought about having more kids.
“I have thought about it” she replies. “Aaaand put the thought to sleep”.
Trying a longer version of the question, Adam asks her if she had a partner, and if they were soulmates, and he wanted children, would she consider having children?
Trying a shorter version of the answer, Kris says “no”.
Still, despite seeming fundamentally incompatible, they decide to see each other again. Adam just has to figure out how to rephrase his question.
BE VERY CLEAR ABOUT WHERE YOU’RE FROM
Bex is a curly-haired girl who really wants you to know how outrageous she is.
“I’m outrageous!” says Bex. “I’m fun, I’m hilarious!” she continues, reading out the thesaurus entry for ‘annoying’. “I’m quite wacky!”.
To seal the deal, Bex does an impression of a dinosaur.
Bex is so zany that she practically asks the barman out. “I’ve got a good posse” she tells him. “Posse?” asks the barman.
“NOT PUSSY, I SAID POSSE!” responds the incredibly outrageous Bex. It’s outrageous!
Meanwhile, Irishman Anthony thinks his smile is the best asset he has.
“Oi tink moi smoile’s the best asset oi have”, he announces, confirming our suspicions that the red-haired man from Ireland with an Irish accent is actually Irish.
Bex asks him where he’s from.
“Ireland”, responds Anthony, cryptically.
Bex keenly observes that “that’s a proper Irish accent”.
“Well, I’m properly Irish” confirms Anthony.
He mentions that he’s from a big Irish family, a sentence that works just as well without ‘Irish’ in it, much like this date.
For someone so wacky and someone so Irish, this should be a more interesting date. The only real highlight comes when Bex calls her friend in the toilet and he suggests that “Irish men are packing heat”.
Look, none of us think these two are compatible, which is confirmed when they have an argument about the word ‘compatible’. Anthony does want to confirm one thing, though:
ORDER THE SEAFOOD
Young Kiki wants to make the world a better place. “Like I wanna be like Shakespeare, like after I die they’re still teaching things that I did in school”.
She’s saving sex for someone who will be grateful for it, which in my experience is roughly everybody.
Lachlan is an art student on a budget, who also wants to change the world as long as it doesn’t cost too much.
Kiki tells us that she’s looking for someone who’s exactly like her, although only seems middling impressed when she meets him.
They talk about relationships and world-changing aspirations and other things young people who don’t watch Home & Away talk about, and all the while Lachlan is trying to use Jedi mind-control on Kiki to stop her from ordering the seafood.
There doesn’t seem to be much romance in the air until the end of the meal, when Lachlan lowers his voice, leans in, makes deep eye contact and says “Are we gonna split, or am I paying?”
At Awkward Question Time, Kiki suggests that they just stay friends.
Lachlan agrees. Friends seems WAY cheaper.
And my final, obvious piece of dating advice:
DON’T HAVE A SUPERMAN TATTOO
Ashley is what happens when you cross a personal trainer with Karl Pilkington from An Idiot Abroad, and is a bit pessimistic about relationships.
“You get to the point where you just wonder what the hell’s the point?” says the little ray of sunshine. “Dating life gets annoying after a while”.
That is, until he sees Nicole’s boobs.
See, Ashley likes independent women, and Nicole recently came back from serving with the Navy in the Middle East. “I don’t know whether I’m intimidated or slightly scared”, says Ashley, not realising that the dictionary definition of ‘intimidated’ is ‘slightly scared’.
Nicole is a very, very awesome, no-nonsense lady who immediately judges Ash based on his Southern Cross tattoo, without even knowing much about him as a person.
When she finds out more about him as a person, she discovers that he has a Superman symbol tattooed on his shoulder.
“It’s a nerdy tatt”, he tells her, not realising that something that’s been available on shirts from Supre for the past 20 years no longer qualifies as ‘nerdy’.
Look, take it from a dating expert: there’s no WAY these two are hooking up.
Turns out she totally sinks his frigate.
Jo Thornely doesn’t get enough attention at her day job, so she writes for various outlets, takes up way too much bandwidth on the internet, and loves it when you explain her jokes back to her on Twitter. Follow her @JoThornely
For more awkward first dates:
‘So bizarre’: Insidious cheating trend exposed
Discovering your other-half is cheating on you is traumatic – but women are now exposing a common act men commit that adds insult to injury.
6-word note given to woman on date
A woman has been left shaken after receiving a message of warning from a stranger during her third date with a man.
Wild way woman found boyfriend cheating
A Melbourne model has detailed the heartbreaking way she found out her ex was cheating on her with countless other women.