Do not adjust your set

Once, depicting gays on television was deemed a turn-off for mainstream audiences. But now a new generation of dating shows sees a pink tint as the key to success

It might, admits executive producer Remy Blumenfeld, have ITV1 viewers "throwing their chips at the screen". At the very least, it will startle anyone who is more accustomed to the channel's traditional offerings. In the autumn - if the pilot shows go down well - Britain's most mainstream commercial network plans to launch a dating show with a definite difference.

Gay, Straight or Taken is described by its producers as "the world's first poly-sexual dating show". Every week, three contestants - gay or straight - will be sent out on dates with three potential partners, one of whom will be gay, one straight and one married. They will then be asked to decide which is which.

"It'll do for dating shows what Will & Grace did for sitcom," says Blumenfeld, of Brighter Pictures, the company making the show for ITV. "Every twist on the usual dating show has already been tried. Blind Date was fun, but the date was the most boring thing about it."

Blind Date, however naughty it pretended to be, was actually rather conservative: it never allowed a homosexual couple on to the screen, despite demands from gay rights groups.

No wonder, perhaps, that ITV's controller of entertainment, Claudia Rosencrantz, is keen to play down the controversy quotient of Gay, Straight or Taken. In fact, she says, it is not particularly gay or even particularly about dating. "It's about first impressions and judging people's appearances," she says. "I like taking wild risks with my commissions but there's actually nothing risky or Channel 4 about this - it'll be very mainstream entertainment."

It is not for the heartland of Saturday night, she adds, but neither will it be hidden away in those midnight slots.

But it is evidence of the arrival of a new genre: gay dating shows are about to land in a big way - and the most watched channels are making sure they do not miss out.

Also launching on ITV1 later this month (29 August) is Love Match, a show that will include episodes dedicated to homosexual speed-dating. Though tucked away in a midnight slot, the show is "a logical progression for the dating genre", according to Carol Groves, ITV1 controller of night-time.

Groves has already done the gay makeover thing with Brian's Boyfriends, hosted by Big Brother winner Brian Dowling. "We also had gay episodes of Dial- a-Date two seasons ago and nobody complained. I'm not worried about alienating the mainstream ITV viewers, as they are all probably in bed by midnight."

Channel 4 and the pay channel Living TV are currently locked in a bidding war over the latest gay-themed reality format from the US. Blown across the Atlantic on a storm of Bible-Belt angst, Boy Meets Boy is a dating format from NBC that does exactly what it says on the tin. As is de rigueur with American dating shows these days, it has a big twist, however - some of the guys are actually straight.

Living TV - which last summer poached first-run rights to every series of the gay sitcom Will & Grace from under Channel 4's nose - is looking to add Boy Meets Boy to its burgeoning slate of "pink reality" formats for next season. These include a British version of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, an NBC makeover format that has five gay style gurus helping out some carefully-selected straight Neanderthals. Living TV has also commissioned 10 hours of Straight Dates by Gay Mates, a homegrown format in which two gay guys fix up straight women with men. Living TV is throwing terrestrial-sized budgets at these pink formats, so could the channel be trying to poach the gay constituency that C4 likes to think it has all to itself? That's unlikely, since Living's shows are aimed at straight couples.

"We found that women watch Living with their husbands or boyfriends," says the channel's controller, Richard Woolfe, "so it's key that we don't offend or alienate straight guys. They are fascinated by the underbelly of gay culture, so long as it's not offensive to them. But Queer Eye is not exactly gay sex - it's mainstream entertainment."

Woolfe even sees his straight male viewers benefiting from a little gay advice: "Judging by the e-mails we get from distraught wives and girlfriends, plenty of straight men desperately need some fashion or hygiene tips, and may recognise themselves in the show." Many women, he adds, will be sitting down with their men to watch Queer Eye with precisely this in mind.

As for Straight Dates, Woolfe says it's simply driven by the fact that, as Madonna and Liz Hurley would testify, the accessory du jour for Britain's upmarket young women is a gay male friend. "Gay guys know what makes women tick," he reckons. At the risk of turning Living's female viewers into the televisual equivalent of fag hags, Woolfe promises lots more pink reality formats for next year, including a travel show.

Meanwhile, Channel 4 won't be left behind. It has recently shown gay episodes of Streetmate and Your Face or Mine, including one in which two lesbians hooked up and eventually got "engaged".

In a world of fauxmosexuals, strays, lipstick lesbians, straight-acting queers and bi-curiosity, Gay, Straight or Taken and Boy Meets Boy are at least recog- nising today's blurry image of sexuality. But reality TV, like drama, requires certain roles, and it may just be that all those straight couples so fascinated by the gay underbelly, and whom networks are so loath to alienate, still prefer their TV gays to be theatrical queens such as Graham Norton and Brian Dowling, rather than everyday folks like themselves.