Celebrity Ex in the City: not even Covid can stop this dating show cringefest

There is never a moment Calum Best isn’t on the 12th floor of some sushi restaurant, winking at a girl in full glam who got an hour-and-a-half train from Kent to be here. That is just a fact. Yes, sometimes, Calum Best does other Calum Best-adjacent things – flexing in the mirror of a prestige gym while wearing a snapback, for instance, or putting his arm round the hot, heavy shoulders of Wayne Lineker – but, more or less, Calum Best exists solely to do the dark bidding of MTV, and MTV wants him on the 12th floor of some sushi restaurant, with a girl who follows him on Instagram and is wearing three pairs of false lashes, saying that intense eye contact with him “makes her shy”.

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Calum Best is always in this sushi restaurant, in a crystal necklace, smiling because he knows he’s two drinks away from taking someone back to a hotel in Stratford, and it’s MTV’s job to make sure a camera is pointing at him while he does it, because that’s how TV works. Calum Best is a sexual economy unto himself. In that respect, he is more bankable than the gold standard.

To Celebrity Ex in the City (Tuesday, 8pm, MTV) then, which is a spin-off of Celebrity Ex on the Beach, which is a spin-off of Ex on the Beach. You can probably figure this one out: various celebs from the Love Island/Boohoo launch party post-economy (Megan Barton-Hanson, Michael Griffiths, Amy Hart, “Gatsby” from Towie, “Charlie” from Towie, Malique Thompson-Dwyer from Hollyoaks and national treasure Aisleyne Horgan-Wallace) all go on a succession of first dates, and then an iPad goes off telling them there’s a surprise coming, and then they are contractually obliged to look shocked when that surprise turns out to be one of their exes showing up … on a show that is literally called Ex in the City.

When this format is held on a beach, after each of the participants has been topless and horny for a succession of weeks beneath the beating Spanish sun, the threat of an ex turning up to endanger those thrilling first stages of a relationship makes for high drama. Here, someone a participant half-messaged once for a bit on Instagram turning up fully clothed to crash the first half-hour of a tepid date doesn’t have the same thrill. Still, the first episode made me cringe so hard my toes tried to retract inside my body, so I guess it has the desired effect.

In a way, I admire the sheer and bulletproof bravado of format television to press on during a pandemic (each date is held at a gigantic table, so that the two people on the date can socially distance and there is still space for a third person to show up, shouting, again at a safe social distance). Yes, most people can’t see their families, but we can still send a celebrity who got famous by being on a dating show on to another dating show just for famous people. Offices are closed, schools struggle on, thousands are trapped in university halls, but nothing – nothing – can stop Calum Best from doing some final pre-date push-up pumps and drinking a tequila with someone he’s already matched with once on Raya. Whatever global events unfold, that will still be happening somewhere. To try to stop it is as futile as pausing the cycle of the moon.