Saturday evening we’d watch Blind Date with the kids.
Blind Date was based on the Australian game show A Perfect Match and the North American show The Dating Game. Cilla Black, everybody's collective mum, played matchmaker to three girls and one guy (and, later in the programme, three guys and one girl).
Cilla introduces the girls
After introducing us to each of the three girls, all “looking for love”, we were introduced to the “lucky fella” (in another part of the studio) who would be going on a date with one of these girls.
Cilla introduces the guy.
The guy, unable to see the girls, got to ask three questions and the girls to reply as best they could.
Made up example:
Questioner: “I really like crisps. If you were a crisp flavour, which one would you be?”
Contestant 1: “Curry flavoured, because I like to be hot AND spicy!”
Audience: “Whooooooooo!”
Subtext: “Pick me and we might have sex.”
Contestant 2: “Beef flavour, because I like a man with some meat!”
Audience: "Whooooooooooooooo!"
Subtext: “Pick me and we'll probably have sex.”
Contestant 3: “Obvious really, tomato sauce flavour because when you pick me I'll be getting saucy with you!”
Audience: “WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
Subtext: “Pick me and we'll go on holiday together and almost certainly have sex.”
And so it went on for two more questions. But, just before the final decision had to be made, in came “Our Graham” (the voice-over man) to sum up the choices something like this:
“Well, will you pick contestant number one, she's hot and spicy but promises not to give you a bad case of halitosis. Or will you pick number two who likes a bit of meat, maybe you should take a butchers! Or will you pick number three who wants to get saucy with you but also has a strange aversion to chickens. The choice... is yours!”
The player now had to decide which of the lucky girls was going to be going on a date with him. Before he could meet her, he got to see the two he rejected…“and how could you turn down number two, the lovely Claire from Bradford?” Then a screen was taken away and the two got to see each other for the first time.
The winning couple would go on a trip together to a location one of the couple would draw from an envelope chosen from several different ones provided. Some were in exotic locations, others were not. Though presented as random, the choice was rigged, and for good reason - an entire film crew had to go on the dates with the couple, and this took significant advance planning.
The location of the date is revealed.
The couple left the studio happily, but had to come back next week to tell us about it.
The show had the classic ingredients of a game: a set of players, a set of payoffs and imperfect information. Therefore your strategy had to be a function of what you guessed the others' strategies might be.
The payoff was clear enough but so were the risks. You might be picked, get a holiday and, who knows, even get on well together. But you could make a fool of yourself, be rejected, or succeed only to have your character publicly dissected in the review the following week.
Yet Blind Date was no mere flash-in-the-pan. Its 356 episodes were screened by London Weekend Television between 30th Nov 1985 and 24th May 2003. With such a repetitive format, what kept it such compulsive viewing?
In our family, it was not so much what little we might learn from the show about the dating game but the conversations it stimulated between us. They might begin like this:
Son to daughter: “you quite fancy that guy.”
Daughter to son: “and why not?”
Son: “he’s a sleazoid, can’t you see, he fancies himself, look at the way he keeps coming his hair.”
Daughter: “you wait; I bet they get on well together.”
As father, I might say: “that girl looks a mess”, and the kinds would reply “oh no, that's the latest fashion, you're sooo out of touch”.
Then they might turn to us and ask: “how did you and mum meet?”, “when did you fall in love?”, “what made you decide to get married?” and so on. From there we might get on to the subject of sex before marriage, and whether it was a good or bad thing that nowadays more young people live together first and marry later.
For half an hour a week it was easier to talk about some of the most important and at the same time least discussable subjects for a teenager (or a parent): how social conventions differ across generations, what nevertheless remains true and what false in human relationships, and how you could tell the difference.
Gregory Bateson, the great anthropologist and thinker, called such conversations “metalogues”. Technically, a metalogue is a conversation engineered and structured to reveal something about the nature of a problem, not just the limits of the subject but the limits of our views on the subject.
There is an interesting new video on TED which neatly makes the point that simplicity often lies at the other side of complexity. The more you can zoom-out and embrace complexity, the better chance you have of zooming-in on the simple details that matter most. Here it is
Just as Blind Date put us in the role of observers of a game, so the Yala puts us in the role of observers of the dialogue at interfaces, able to zoom-out and zoom-in, stimulating metalogue.
Bateson used imagined conversations with his daughter to illustrate the concept. Here is an excerpt from his “Metalogue: About Games and Being Serious” from Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972):
Bateson & daughter
Daughter: Daddy, are these conversations serious?
Father: Certainly they are.
D: They are not a sort of game that you play with me?
F: God forbid…but they are a sort of game that we play together.
D: Then they’re not serious!
***
F: Suppose you tell me what you would understand by the word “serious” and a “game.”
D: Well…if you’re…I don’t know.
F: If I am what?
D: I mean…the conversations are serious for me, but if you’re only playing a game…
F: Steady now. Let’s look at what is good and what is bad about “playing” and “games.” First of all, I don’t mind – not much – about winning or losing. When your questions put me in a tight spot, sure, I try a little harder to think straight and to say clearly what I mean. But I don’t bluff and I don’t set traps. There is no temptation to cheat.
D: That’s just it. It’s not serious to you. It’s a game. People who cheat just don’t know how to play. They treat a game as though it were serious.
F: But it is serious.
D: No, it isn’t – not for you it isn’t.
F: Because I don’t even want to cheat?
D: Yes – partly that.
F: But do you want to cheat and bluff all the time?
D: No – of course not.
F: Well then?
D: Oh - Daddy - you'll never understand.
F: I guess I never will.
F: Look, I scored a sort of debating point just now by forcing you to admit that you don’t want to cheat – and then I tied onto that admission the conclusion that therefore the conversations are not “serious” for you either. Was that sort of cheating?
D: Yes – sort of.
F: I agree – I think it was. I’m sorry.
D: You see, Daddy – if I cheated or wanted to cheat, that would mean that I was not serious about the things we talk about. It would mean that I was only playing a game with you.
F: Yes, that makes sense.
***
D: But it doesn’t make sense, Daddy. It’s an awful muddle.
F: Yes – a muddle – but still a sort of sense.
D: How, Daddy?
***
F: Wait a minute. This is difficult to say. First of all – I think that we get somewhere in these conversations. I enjoy them very much and I think you do. But also, apart from that, I think that we get some ideas straight and I think that the muddles help. I mean – that if we both spoke logically all the time, we would never get anywhere. We would only parrot the old clichés that everybody has repeated for hundreds of years.
D: What is a cliché, Daddy?
F: A cliché? It’s a French word, and I think it was originally a printer’s word. When they print a sentence they have to take the separate letters and put them one by one into a sort of grooved stick to spell out the sentence. But for words and sentences which people use often, the printer keeps little sticks of letters ready made up. And these ready-made sentences are called clichés.
D: But I’ve forgotten now what you were saying about clichés, Daddy.
F: Yes – it was about muddles that we get into in these talks and how getting into muddles makes a sort of sense. If we didn’t get into muddles, our talks would be like playing rummy without first shuffling the cards.
D: Yes, Daddy – but what about those things – the ready made sticks of letters?
F: The clichés? Yes – it’s the same thing. We all have lots of ready made phrases and ideas, and the printer has ready-made sticks of letters, all sorted out into phrases. But if the printer wants to print something new – say, something in a new language, he will have to break up all the old sorting of the letters. In the same way, in order to think new thoughts or to say new things, we have to break up all our ready-made ideas and shuffle the pieces.
D: But, Daddy, the printer would not shuffle all the letters? Would he? He wouldn’t shake them all up in a bag. He would put them one by one in their places – all the a’s in one box and all the b’s in another, and all the commas in another, and so on.
F: Yes - that’s right. Otherwise he would go mad trying to find an a when he wanted it.
***
F: What are you thinking?
D: No – it’s only there are so many questions.
F: For example?
D: Well, I see what you mean about our getting into muddles. That makes us say new sorts of things. But I am thinking about the printer. He has to keep all his little letters sorted out even though he breaks up all the ready-made phrases. And I am wondering about our muddles. Do we have to keep the little pieces of our thoughts in some sort of order – to keep from going mad?
F: I think so – yes – but I don’t know what sort of order. That would be a terribly hard question to answer. I don’t think we could get an answer to that question today.
***
F: You said there were “so many questions.” Do you have another?
D: Yes – about games and being serious. That’s what we started from, and I don’t know how or why that led us to talk about muddles. The way you confuse everything – it’s sort of cheating.
F: No, absolutely not.
***
F: You brought up two questions. And really there are a lot more… We started from the question about these conversations – are they serious? Or are they a sort of game? And you felt hurt that I might be playing a game, while you were serious. It looks as if a conversation is a game if a person takes part in it with one set of emotions or ideas – but not a “game” if his ideas or emotions are different.
D: Yes, it’s if your ideas about conversation are different from mine…
F: If we both had the game idea, it would be all right?
D: Yes – of course.
F: Then it seems to be up to me to make clear what I mean by game idea. I know that I am serious – whatever that means – about the things that we talk about. We talk about ideas. And I know that I play with the ideas in order to understand them and fit them together. It’s “play” in the same sense that a small child “plays” with blocks… And a child with building blocks is mostly serious about his “play.”
D: But is it a game, Daddy? Do you play against me?
F: No, I think of it as you and I playing together against the building blocks – the ideas. Sometimes competing a bit – but competing as to who can get the next idea into place. And sometimes we attack each other’s bit of building, or I will try to defend my built-up ideas from your criticism. But always in the end we are working together to build the ideas up so they will stand.
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