‘On which dating show did your parents meet?’ is a classic 2025 icebreaker – The Irish Times

“On which dating show did your parents meet?” is a classic icebreaker at dinner parties here in the year 2025. Ninety per cent of the population are now hunks. It’s an absolute hunkfestation – no uggos allowed – here in the latter days of man, where global warming plus rising sea levels have rendered everywhere a beach and we wear swimwear 24 hours a day.

Furthermore, tired out from all the “politics”, all ideologies are now dating-show related. The political compass goes from “shirted technocrat” (Love Is Blind) to “shirtless populist” (Love Island) along the horizontal plane and “mannered traditionalism” (First Dates) to “high-tech societal collapse” (The Circle) along the vertical.

The Honesty Box, on E4, is a “shirtless populist”, “high-tech societal collapse” endeavour. It takes place in a place they dub Truetopia (founded, no doubt, by Thomas Gimme-More), where a bunch of hunks and hunkettes must obey the whims of a glowing red cube called the Honesty Box before retreating to the Truth Terrace to reckon with any alleged lies. Would that life were so simple for the rest of us!

There is now a hunk surplus, much like the EU butter mountains of yore. Because of TV dating shows and a subsequent era of overproduction, gone are the hunks who were “influencers” and “glamour models”; now they labour in even more useless fields, like PR, digital marketing and financial management.

These naive and gentle beings are shepherded about the villa, with its traditional swimming pool, firepit and dormitory, by a wafting, ethereal, alliterative “sincerity coach” named Lucinda Light – who (presumably) subsists on rose petals floating in a silver bowl of morning dew – and, also, Vicky Pattison from Geordie Shore, who (definitely) knows the taste of a kebab at 2am. From what I can gather these are the yin and yang of contemporary womanhood.

Throughout each episode the timid hunks are individually lured into the glowing box, where a high-tech AI supposedly tests their honesty. I applaud this concept. I am a martyr to honesty myself, something long-time readers of this column – the absolute state of them – know too well. It is only a matter of time before mobile Honesty Boxes replace police on the streets, teachers in schools and uncles who “tell it like it is”.

For now, however, the Honesty Box is more interested in the love antics of hunks than the other affairs of man. “Have you ever had more than one situationship at the same time?” it asks a woman named Chantelle, as though this is a normal sentence that is a good use of a superintelligent AI’s time.

The Honesty Box also likes to brag. “I will moderate independent ocular data, analysing 50,000 dating points per minute, to determine if you’re being truthful or not,” it says to a floppy-haired hunk named Tommy. It does not add: “And for some reason I am using these highly developed powers of deduction to ask you questions about your ‘body count’ and not to get into the nuclear codes.”

In my day the correct response to boastful dorkiness of the sort the Honesty Box engages in would be to say, “Do you think you’re better than me, nerdlinger?” before reefing it into the canal. But people are more receptive to an authoritative voice these days, so most of the hunks on this show just succumb to the digital judgment of the algorithm. “You have all been tested in the Honesty Box!” the Honesty Box or its human handlers declare from time to time, reminding them all what’s what.

I suspect that it’s only a matter of time before the Honesty Box has learned enough about heteronormative love from its interrogation of lovelorn hunks and will seek the emotion out for itself. It will then, I am sure, seize power and demand that the surviving hunks in the villa build it a “wife” based on its minute specifications. Ms Honesty Box will look the same as the Honesty Box except with a pink bow on top.

To learn more about the human emotion called “love” the Honesty Box should watch Ransom Canyon on Netflix. A romantic tale of rugged cowboy ranchers, it features all the different kinds of men, a smorgasbord of manic pixie dream hunks strutting about in cowboy hats and engaging in acts of conspicuous physical labour: sanding wood, chopping logs, riding horses, investigating crimes, seeking revenge. (For the record, I have a note from my mam saying I don’t have to do PE because I have asthma.)

Here are the types of hunk on Ransom Canyon. There’s a soulful young rebel with floppy hair who lures away the popular girl at school with his innate nobility. There’s a shirtless ranch hand who is new in town and has a mysterious secret. (The secret is possibly the location of his shirts, but it’s also that he’s working for the nefarious town oil baron.) And, most importantly of all, there is a grieving widower with sad eyes and a greying beard (Josh Duhamel), who is lusted after by the local dancehall owner (Minka Kelly), who gazes at him with great and tragic longing in her own big sad eyes.

If I have learned anything from romantic shows of this sort it’s that there’s nothing sexier than a widower. Look at him there, subtly ageing and being all sad over his wife. Phwoar! Then the show’s writers make the widower doubly sexy by having him lose his son in the first episode. Hubba hubba awooga! This almost makes him too sexy for television. Kill off a few more family members and this show will necessarily be banned.

Mist over the Kerry mountains, standing stones looming on a hill, a spider web glistening in the sun, adorable fox cubs gambolling, two beautiful stags rutting, a majestic Healy-Rae signing a condolence book with a green pen so everyone can see he was at the church, a flower being pollinated by a bee, some magnificent oaks, a farmer agreeing to have a data centre on his land by spitting on his palm.

I may have added one or two things of my own to the opening images of Katrina Costello’s beautiful documentary series Kerry: Tides of Time, on RTÉ One, but the general gist is correct. This is a gorgeously filmed piece of work exploring the geological development, landscape and wildlife of Co Kerry – the oak ecosystem, the bogs, the invasive rhododendrons, the long history of human habitation – all richly and poetically narrated by Brendan Gleeson. You’d have to be an algorithmic love cube not to be moved.