A hundred people work in the bowels of the heart with the best beat on TV. ‘First Dates’, Cuatro’s most watched program, is followed by more than a million ‘lovers’. “With the experience we’ve gained, we could set up a marriage agency,” says the executive producer.
It doesn’t matter what sexual orientation, pasta or studies you have. It doesn’t matter if you are a boy, a girl or a girl, whether you are 18 or 99 years old or whether you are a Gasol or a Torrebruno, from the PP or from Podemos, in ‘First Dates’ every line- up from stars is possible, they bring integration and naturalness into DNA, but success can be summed up in four words. “They said yes.”
When that happens, the room where those responsible for finding the perfect matches work explodes in a triumphant cry, like NASA’s when a rocket takes off. It’s the reward of hours of interviews, hundreds of phone calls, and phone castings to gather information and profile the “daters” (as they call those here who come looking for love on the show), and to analyze all that data to “pairing” them with the right person on their first blind date. Half say yes and bet on a second courtship, “a success, as the world is,” says Yolanda Martín, executive producer of the courtship program, Cuatro’s most watched, 7.7% share, and more than a million believers from Monday till Friday.
This Valentine’s Tuesday, onlookers who show up at 9:45 p.m. at the iconic “First Dates” restaurant will see a menu peppered with “yes.” Carlos Sobera, the ‘maitre d’ with a steady job in the seven years the format has aired, will once again show his matchmaking skills to give love a chance. Nearly 17,000 dinner parties have circulated through the raised eyebrows… and seven weddings! Sobera has seen it all, but he assures that he is still surprised. “Something happens every day.”
Yolanda Martín, a “salty” Malaga of 74, leads a team of one hundred workers, including an army of journalists dedicated to selecting the ‘daters’, creating a profile with their tastes, their personality and their expectations, and finding them their other half, the perfect flirt, the “match” (in fact, they describe themselves as “matchers” or “matchadores”). Every season they receive thousands of calls from singles “much less in the summer”, but the casting editors themselves also conduct an exhaustive search (from nursing homes to youth recreation centers) “to achieve that extraordinary diversity of eaters in our restaurant”, Yolanda explains.
His right hand is Vanesa Ferreiro (Pontevedra, 43 years old), director of ‘First Dates’, who, from the control room and surrounded by a swarm of screens, does not lose sight of the deluge of images collected by 35 robotic cameras scattered throughout the restaurant . Not a single technician swarms between the tables, only the diners (with extras to ‘fill’ the room) and the team of waiters. A huge workload selects the most relevant details of each appointment. And, as they insist, there’s no script or anything like that. For not having, there are no screenwriters. “No one is told what to do or say,” Yolanda and Vanesa say.
The shots start the engines at eleven in the morning and end after three in the afternoon. Nine dinners are filmed from Monday to Friday (no one hesitates to put two dishes and a dessert brought by a caterer between chest and back at that time), although only five are broadcast in each episode. Each meeting lasts an hour and twenty and the team of editors selects 20 minutes, of which the audience only sees twelve in the end, divided into two-minute bites that jump from table to table “to lighten it up”.
Yolanda thinks these ‘short TikTok-like’ videos work very well. “I think the success of ‘First Dates’ lies in the simplicity of the product, in that every night people come out of their homes to watch two people go on a first date, it’s as simple as that, there’s nothing else” . Today’s audience (we visited the facilities last Thursday) proves him right: 9.7% audience share and 1.4 million viewers. The director is happy and excited to meet an 88-year-old “dater” who has been encouraged to join the program.
In order for the spark to fly and the appointment not to leak, the matchadores’ previous work is essential. “We are psychologists of life,” says Amparo Feira, a journalist in charge of a team of “matchmakers” who operate in the real “kitchen” of the program where they try to match the ingredients so that the first dinner turns out to be astonishing. It’s the program’s ultimate goal: entertainment and love, a powerful formula that, 1,600 episodes later, continues to seduce audiences without showing signs of wear and tear.
“The anti-date is not wanted,” says the executive producer, despite that 50% failure rate, some terrifying like the one that recently went viral when Med, an arrogant bachelor with a certain macho stench, tried to give lessons to Luisa, a young Cuban doctor. Few programs have experienced such a thrilling moment. It couldn’t have ended worse on purpose. “If it’s gone viral and helps prevent this behavior from happening again, great,” says Yolanda, who prefers to stick with the “many people” who depend on ‘First Dates’ to find love. “In these seven years we have gained so much experience that we can set up a marriage agency,” he illustrates.
When the ‘daters’ arrive at the diner’s doors, almost everything about his life is known. There is a very conscientious previous job to find out their hobbies, their profession, their academic education, whether they have or want to have children, their sentimental past, what their ideal partner is or their favorite musical taste. “What we’re trying to do is categorize these people to know what areas we’re moving into. And then we try to find a person who fits what they want. If someone tells you they like men with long hair, you’re not going to make them bald. If you don’t want children, we won’t match you with someone who wants to start a family,” Amparo describes. Their enthusiastic brigade of matchers are called the ‘covens’, due to the fact that they work magic among the ‘daters’. “There is no scientific basis, there is no laboratory. There’s a lot of heart palpitations,” says Amparo, who confesses that when that magic doesn’t happen, they feel “a bit of a failure.”
But there are “coven” moments that taint any failure. When “daters” say “yes” to each other or seal their first date with a kiss, the “First Dates” staff celebrate that as a goal. “That’s what the whole team came to, it’s a rush,” describes Vanesa, a direct witness to that decisive moment through the screens. Sometimes you don’t have to wait until the end of dinner to know that this couple is like a glove. The first exchange of glances in the bar is enough to make all butterflies fly in the stomach and the crush explodes. “Sometimes we know from the moment they walk in the door that it’s going to work. It’s pure chemistry. It’s instantaneous, you see it and whoosh,” Vanesa sums up. “You see their eyes shine and you know it’s done, everything flows, their faces light up and no more questions are needed… Look, look… I’ll tell you and my hair will stand on end”, Yolanda points it out and shows the epidermis of her forearm. “There are competitions that surpass us, that surpass the best dreams. I always think they were destined to meet. The carambola of fate brought them to ‘First Dates’, but it could have been anywhere,” he emphasizes.
Carlos Sobera (Baracaldo, 62 years old) has fond memories of those sparks. An indelible one, that of a couple with Down syndrome who ended up on the program in the second season. «In my life I have seen a more sincere and spontaneous expression of love, with a brutal intensity. The best Hollywood screenwriters would like it themselves ».
Sobera has been called a pimp, matchmaker… and he’s delighted. “That’s the beauty of this program, you play matchmaker and pimp, and that gives you new content and gives you a completely different channel of communication with people.” And he adds: “Here you are playing with sensitive material because they haven’t come to make money or hang out, they’re telling you deeper things, things that concern them. There are people who want to fall in love, but others come just to get rid of loneliness. They are looking for someone to go to the movies or out to dinner with with no strings attached, not even sex.
Despite his seven years as ‘maitre d’ (“they have passed me by like a breath of fresh air”), Sobera is nevertheless stopped on the street to ask him if the ‘daters’ are actors and to ask for advice on love. “When I was doing contests they asked me for money and now they ask me to find them a boyfriend or girlfriend. This strengthens the credibility of the program. Some see it to say ‘the mother who gave birth to me, how are the Spanish people doing’, others because it moves them, others for the fun of betting when the love story ends, but people see it because they believe it “, says Sobera., which likens “First Dates” to a mirror “that you put in front of the collective and we learn how we think, how we act and how we love. It’s like a slice of real life.”
The truth is that every night the audience attends a curious spectacle of voyeurism in which the ‘daters’ talk openly, sometimes with astonishing naturalness, about their sexual preferences or admit that they have never read a book in their lives… eyes of a million people. Gossip or romantics? “We believe in love. I tell you completely convinced. It’s what moves us,” says the executive producer.
She, like Sobera, believes that the ‘daters’ represent the plurality of Spanish society and denies that extravagant couples are sought after to attract attention. «Your neighbour, your cousin, your friend, the one from the shop next door passes by this restaurant… everyone. What happens then is that you always stay with the most deviant, the one that attracts your attention the most… but even the controller of my bank has been here,” concludes Yolanda, a stable partner for 26 years, but who also calls the doors of the restaurant “if that was the case”… because if Paris is missing one day, we always have ‘First Dates’.
Does ‘First Dates’ look closely at the ‘heart’ of Spanish society? Does it faithfully represent the mosaic of relationships in our country? Luis Ayuso, a sociology professor at the University of Malaga and a specialist in family sociology, points out that the program does indeed contain couple models, but pushes them to the limit “and that’s what attracts an audience”. Co-editor of the study ‘Dealing with privacy in the digital society. Couples and Breakups in Spain Today,” an exhaustive nearly 500-page survey published by the BBVA Foundation that identifies more than twenty different types of couples, Ayuso recalls that “First Dates,” no matter how much love it contains, don’t stop being a television show that, like everyone else, is trying to raise hearing meters. “The program is one thing and the reality is another,” says the professor, for whom the format is not a reflection of social reality but part of it, “or if you want, enlarge it,” he specifies. However, Ayuso, crediting “First Dates” with the merit of approaching the multiplicity of couples in Spanish society, believes one of the keys to its success is that the idea of romantic love works “really well” in Spain. “It’s an issue that sets us apart from other European countries, we are a very loving society, we believe a lot in that idea of romantic love. Seeing how a pair is formed and attending the courtship has an impact. It is the same as infidelity, they are two formats that are repeated over and over because they give an audience ».
Source: La Verdad
I am David Jackson, a highly experienced professional in the news industry. I have been working as an author at Today Times Live for over 10 years, and specialize in covering the entertainment section. My expertise lies in writing engaging stories that capture readers’ attention and deliver timely information about the latest developments.
