January was a month for trying new things – but while my girlfriend took a step further towards maturity I took a giant leap back, writes Dan Wainwright.

My other half has recently discovered the joys of Radio 4 after accidentally fiddling with the car stereo and not being able to work out how to turn it off.

She came home from some typically energetic activity she does on weekends to tell me she’d been listening to that oh-so-clever comedian David Mitchell and later said she had done a load of work listening to a half-hour programme on puddings.

I’m delighted for her.

I, on the other hand, watched Take Me Out on ITV on Saturday. I was skint, therefore at home, and couldn’t find the remote.

But blow me down with a feather if it isn’t the most absurdly hilarious programme.

Paddy McGuinness descends to the floor from a cylindrical lift and then stands and revels in it as a bevy of girls with orange skin stride down the steps like Oompa Loompas about to sing a song about children being greedy in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.

Out come the boys, who one by one state their case for a date while the girls turn off their lights and dole out various insults.

It’s like Blind Date, only instead of Cilla and a bit of cheeky innuendo (you know, where the off duty copper says you can take down his particulars) we get screaming girls and blokes in leotards strutting their funky stuff.

That’s when it all gets a bit depressing as the girls start to switch off their lights to convey their displeasure. The poor bloke with no choices left ends up walking up the stairs to the tune of All By Myself by Celine Dion and for all we know he is found in a skip the next morning, half devoured by stray dogs.

For the lucky man who gets to have his pick of the remaining girls there’s a “date” set up at the end. Sadly, it’s just a bar they’re sent to. They basically just go for a drink, rather than the old Blind Date formula where they’d make them go scuba diving or put them in a gondola in Venice and see what happened.

Well I guess we have just come out of a recession. The best bit for me though was when I thought Paddy made a joke about them going to Nando’s, the high street chicken restaurant. Unfortunately I misheard him and he actually said Fernando’s, the name of the bar.

Saturday night has been missing this old style cheeky battle of the sexes. A guilty pleasure of mine was Man Oh Man, starring a pre Who Wants to be a Millionaire Chris Tarrant in the 1990s.

Quite apart from all the models in bikinis pushing blokes into a swimming pool it was basically a chance to laugh at my fellow human being without having to hear the sob stories that inevitably accompany the X Factor or Britain’s Got Talent. The contestants are quickly and cleanly dispatched and forgotten about.

There’s no investment in the person with shows like Take Me Out. You can just watch them in the bar and know full well that as surely as the happy couple will never see each other again, neither will they turn up on your TV set – or release a syrupy cover version at Christmas.