30 year old Lucy Robinson played by Claire Wood sets out to find Love in Channel 4’s Love Virtually.
In this short 23 minute ‘documentary’, we glimpse an insight into the world of online dating, where five real women confess their very own cyber dating habits. We also follow character Lucy, a blogger for Marie Claire who reveals all her efforts through her online diary, and who is supposed to mimic someone who is deeply involved with datinghut.com, and goes on various dates yet is struck unlucky throughout almost every one.
Her peak point is when she meets Martin Walker in London. She said: “Martin had bad hair, a scruffy jacket, and even bought me a can of cheap lager. But, I knew almost straight away that I’d fall in love with him... And I did.” They soon enough become an item, and she uploads pictures of them on social networking website Facebook, to go ‘public with their relationship’. Lucy seems to become obsessed with him when he’s not around, checking out what he’s up to, to keeping his dating profile on lock.
Unfortunately for her, her quick romance is soon over when he tells her he doesn’t love her anymore. We then see the heartache and how she copes with the break up.
Whilst Lucy’s story develops, the four real women comment on the different relative parts of the programme just like a bad episode of Grumpy Old Women. Katy 29 said: “The moment you have to remove your ex-boyfriend as a friend is just, it’s almost like breaking up a second time. In fact actually I’ve removed my ex-boyfriend now twice!”
She carried on saying: “So you have access to the things that they are doing without the context around it. So every girl he became friends with, every party that he was at, I started analysing ‘Who is she?’ ‘What’s going on?’ ‘Are they having fun without me?”
Unfortunately for me, I really disliked this programme. Although we come to realise Lucy’s character is staged, it’s almost too staged to be true. Her acting is actually pretty terrible.
And as for the real women, they make women out to be clingy, obsessed, and an overall pain to deal with. They portray women to also have a compulsive addiction to social networking sites and the women who internet date seem to have a fast-track ticket to find love quickly.
I think because of the terrible staged nature and how badly women are portrayed, it has given me reason to really have a negative view towards it. Not what I expected from Channel 4.
