If people don’t approve of a programme they can always switch over instead of getting hot under the collar.DARREN JOHNSON, dispatch rider: There’s no way I’d describe it as too rude. It’s trivial, a little demeaning to relationships, but not rude Even if it was, it wouldn’t particularly bother me I am against any type of censorship on television. Cilla Black is a very good presenter but I do get fed up with her – they could have different presenters on it, Tony from East17 would be all right.FATHER JUDE BULLOCK: Blind Date isn’t on my list of favourite viewing but I have watched it. It used to be family entertainment but it stuns me now when I see it – it’s really raunchy stuff. I wonder what goes through youngsters’ heads when they hear what the contestants say.VIKKI BURLEY, aged nine: It’s brillant, it’s my favourite programme. I like to see all the different people and they get a free holiday. I’m a traditionalist and believe falling in love takes longer than two statements.

I want to know if the contestants liked each other, not whether they got their leg over.CHRISTINA DODWELL, explorer and writer: Blind Date is a tragedy for all the romantics of this world. I’ve only watched it once, and I thought it was very sexy and probably not rude enough. MARY WHITEHOUSE: Blind Date mixes the cheap with the rich. Some of its stuff is an insult to viewers, some of it is delightfully innocent.
NED SHERRIN, radio presenter: I adore it, but I’m waiting for Peter Tatchell to demand equal time for gay daters.MARCELLE D’ARGY SMITH, editor, Cosmopolitan: I find it gratuitously ill-mannered. He had been at the factory two years without his eccentricity coming to light Take a look at the man next to you He, too, could be one of the other half.. REDMOND O’HANLON, writer: Blind Date is an excellent example of Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. As a Liverpudlian male, however, he is assumed to be football-wise.

During a stint as a metalworker a few years ago, he was put in the factory team.After he threw the ball in one-handed, his team-mates realised the truth; as did the other side. “I find it quite amusing the way people are rabid about it,” he observes.Ian says he didn’t come under pressure in the playground, but then his toughness was never in doubt. Now 34, he grew up in Walton, close to both the Liverpool and Everton grounds, and yet remained almost completely immune to the pull of the stadiums As a youth, he preferred going rabbiting with his ferret There was also punk rock. “Before that, I used to catch frogs.” His uncle took him to a football match when he was 10, but he was bored. Lighting technician Ian Burns devoted much of his leisure time in his formative years to rediscovering the skills of the hunter. It’s the belief that men evolved to stand in groups of several thousand, shouting.Of course, the truth is that men evolved in small hunter-gatherer bands. What the football dissidents object to is not football, it’s the fans.