Have you been watching ... First Dates?

First Dates is set in a restaurant, and the show flits from table to table taking the temperature of how the date is going. Photograph: Ryan Mcnamara

Now that it's halfway through its run, the unique selling point of Channel 4's First Dates has become unmistakably clear: it's a dating show about dating. This is almost unprecedented. Almost every other dating show around at the moment is so concerned with pairing people up – blindly flinging strangers together in a giddy, lowered-expectation, 3am small-town nightclub rush of noise and colour – that what actually happens when these people have to spend time with each other is only vaguely gestured at.

Not on First Dates, though. First Dates is all about the actual date itself. Although it has a fascinating process – viewers at home can apply online to date people onscreen, in order to appear on the following week's show – that's hardly dealt with at all. Instead, the whole show follows what happens in the glorious window between the moment two strangers meet for the first time and the moment they're finally allowed to clank down their cutlery, sigh with relief and pelt off in different directions as fast as their legs will carry them.

On the surface, First Dates doesn't look as if it has much new to offer. It's a fixed-rig documentary, just like 90% of Channel 4's current output. It's The Fried Chicken Shop with tablecloths. It's a more awkward The Hotel. It's 24 Hours In Er & Um. But here, with the possible exception of A&E, the format is at its strongest. Set in a restaurant, the show flits from table to table, taking the temperature of how profoundly awkward one date is, before moving on to another table, invariably one where the couple are having the time of their lives purely because they're blootered on four bottles of wine.

Obviously, a series such as First Dates lives or dies by its characters, and in that regard the producers have either been very shrewd or very lucky. Put, say, me in a first-date environment – worse still, a blind date that is being broadcast on television – and I'd burn up, anxiously mutter a string of unintentional insults, and try to escape through the toilet window a nanosecond after the waiter had brought the bread basket to the table. Chances are you'd be the same. But First Dates has a glut of incredible peacocks to choose from.

Two weeks ago, for instance, we met a nice old man who used to make porn films, and chose to mention this to his date at the earliest possible opportunity. To her eternal credit, she managed to take this news completely in her stride. "Have you got a biggun, then?" she replied between sips of her drink. And then there's Rajan, who is currently in danger of becoming the show's star attraction. In episode two he scared off one prospective date by aggressively maintaining his right not to dance in a nightclub. In last week's episode his opening salvo was: "It's OK, I like curvy women." That meal ended prematurely, with Rajan calling for the bill after he took offence at a passing comment and started yelling "RED FLAG! RED FLAG!" over and over again like a Brick Tamland robot that someone had just spilled juice on.

By dealing with the innately horrible process of dating – the drooping shoulders, the sly watch-checking, the profoundly lonely moment that you realise the universe is a howling void and you're going to die alone – instead of, say, Paddy McGuinness bellowing and pulling faces, First Dates is easily the most human dating show I've seen for years. Admittedly I have to watch about 60% of it through my fingers, but I do still watch it. A second series can't come quickly enough.

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