There will come a time when starting a relationship with someone face to face – in a pub, say, or a nightclub – will be rare.
In fact, we're nearly at that point already. This is not a bad thing. It's just the way life works for modern couples, of all ages: it is easy, safe and convenient to start a relationship on dating sites or through social networking, and before long, most relationships will start this way.
Then, when someone invents a method of having sex by internet, there will be no need to meet your partner at all. We will meet, go out, dump and be dumped all online. The whole world will become a computer game.
With great perspicacity, Channel 4 has given us a new drama looking at this trend. In a series of half-hour episodes, Dates (Channel 4, Mon-Wed, 10pm) focuses on the first date of a range of different couples, all of whom have been emailing or texting each other first. In the first episode, Mia (played by Oona Chaplin) has created a false identity online aimed at attracting men but also to protect herself because that's what the internet does: it allows you to create another you but it also fuels your paranoia that everyone else is doing exactly the same thing.
When Mia eventually meets her date, David (played by Will Mellor), it takes her a while to admit she is the woman he has been talking to online. She sits by the bar sussing David out before she approaches him. It's awkward and horrible because this is a couple who have become used to doing relationships through a website rather than face to face. "It's different," says David, "here in the flesh."
They then get down to the date and we get to know who David and Mia are. David is from Yorkshire and he's all battered and lined and warm. Mia is from London and is slick and southern and cynical. It's like old Britain meeting new Britain over lunch, north flirting with south, Harrods on a date with Primark.
Both performances are good – and Sheridan Smith was excellent on Tuesday too – but the joy of Dates is the way it is made. The first 25 minutes of Monday's episode with Mia and David were set in just one room, and in modern television terms that is extraordinary. Not only that, the camera work was wonderful too. Most camera work now resembles someone desperately trying to take snaps in the middle of an earthquake. But the makers of Dates – who also, perhaps surprisingly, made Skins – did the opposite, pointing the camera in one direction and keeping it there. It meant the picture was demoted and the script was promoted.
Perhaps we can now look forward to more television like this, more slowness, less hyperactivity; perhaps there will be a reverse revolution in television. Then we'll be able to sit down and watch and concentrate, while desperately trying to resist the temptation to go online.
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