People are getting very worked up about ITV’s new dating show, My Mum, Your Dad. It has been called the middle-aged Love Island, although Davina McCall, who seem delighted to be presenting it, doesn’t like the term “middle aged”, preferring “midlife”, for reasons that are opaque to me. Sure, “middle aged” has connotations – I think of grey roots and annoyingly wide shoes – but I have never once used the word “midlife” without ending it in “crisis”, the same way I still can’t say “King Charles” without saying “spaniel”. Let’s just go with “old”.
If you fall on the middle-aged curve and have watched Love Island, you will surely have given some thought to what it would look like stuffed with old people. The obvious flaw in the concept is that surely 80% or 90% of the point is how hot the contestants look in bikinis or tiny shorts. Of course, the maintenance of a 25-year-old physique into your twilight years is a tabloid obsession; if Liz Hurley can do it, then, technically, we all can.
But there will be trade-offs. If you get a bunch of 45-year-olds as buff as young ’uns, there is a good chance they are disciplined. They probably don’t drink very much. I would venture that they are not impulsive; they defer gratification; perhaps they meditate. I bet they eat a lot of fruit. How on earth you would get such people to make bad decisions is beyond me. How watchable it would be – a retreat full of people making good decisions in a timely fashion while trying not to hurt each other’s feelings – is an open question.
When it comes to the dormitory, unbelievable amounts of verbal traffic will go on how everyone slept. The answer will be “badly”, but a lot of texture will go into it: the precise nature of the disturbances; passive-aggressive allusions to whose fault it was.
Sure, this is what editors are for, but I wonder what will be left. They will talk about their exes a lot, which will also have to be cut, for legal reasons. I am worried that at least one of them will have a hobby such as crochet. They will say very little – and what they do say will give us all a bad name.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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