Come Dine With Me's biggest behind the scenes secrets revealed

Yahoo

11-02-2025

Former Come Dine With Me contestants have served up delicious behind-the-scenes secrets for filming the dinner parties.
Incase you have somehow missed Come Dine With Me — five strangers host a dinner party, taking turns at each other's homes and rate the experience out of 10 including the food and the entertainment. The winner with the highest score takes home a £1,000 cash prize at the end of the week.
Yes, that means often Come Dine With Me gets awkward. The jaw-dropping moment former contestant Peter Marsh told one winner of Come Dine With Me in 2016 "what a sad little life, Jane" springs to mind.
Years later, Come Dine With Me is still erupting into rows like the recent fish-gate episode.
Come Dine With Me has been on Channel 4 for 20 years, so there are lots of things that happen behind the cameras that have become known as open secrets in the TV world.
One of the central parts of Come Dine With Me is the witty narration by Dave Lamb who never appears on-screen. The hilarious narrator let us in on the secret about the script and how he sometimes tones it down last minute.
Asked if he's ever crossed the line with his narration, he told Off Air... With Jane and Fi: "I really hope not. A lot of the time – everything I say is scripted, because of the way it's filmed. Obviously, they're cutting down five whole days and evenings of shooting into five half-hour shows.
"So they have to tell a very tight story, with a proper narrative arc. So they have to be very precise about what gets said. I'm reading from a script, which I'm allowed to ad-lib around. If anything, I will try and tone it down rather than making it more cutting.
"I think what this show does really well is bring everyone with it. I don't think there's a nastiness to it, at least I hope there isn't. It's not about shooting fish in a barrel or trying to get one over on people. It's about trying to have fun.
"There's teasing, definitely, but hopefully it's inclusive, gentle teasing and teasing of everybody. I'd hate to think that it's nasty, I've really tried hard to make it not."
Come Dine With Me is filmed over the space of the week, like how it is cut for screens but the filming hours are long.
Bernadette MacKenzie, who runs Ayrshire's Wee Fish Van and appeared on Come Dine With Me last week, said the day starts where the contestants are driven individually to a hotel where they can rate their rival's menu in the morning from 8am.
After going home for a few hours, she told The Sun that the contestants are then driven to the dinner parties.
Previously, former contestant and showbiz journalist Benjy Potter said it takes eight hours to film one dinner party, with the contestants arriving at 4pm and sometimes not wrapping up until 1am. Consequently as the filming takes so long, the contestant claimed the food is served "cold".
He wrote in The Sun in 2020: "It's much more exhausting than it looks on screen. On telly, the dinner parties might appear seamless, but in real life they can take up to eight hours to film." Those knocking sequences take 15 minutes to shoot too, he said.
TV bosses have previously "advised" contestants to "hold stuff back" so they still have things to talk about over the course of the week, according to Potter, and they have to hold off on the booze too.
There is a tight budget for the Come Dine With Me contestants to show off their culinary skills. The money can also be used towards decorating their homes and for eye-catching costumes worn on the filming night.
Recent Come Dine With Me star MacKenzie said contestants were given £150 to splash out on their meals. There have been differing reports over the amounts of money over the years, with former 2014 contestant Katy Spence claiming they got £250 and The Sun's Benjy Potter saying he was given £125 in 2020.
What remains the same is that all contestants have the chance of winning the £1,000 cash prize at the end of the week. The named winner is served up the £1,000 cash prize in real £20s in a silver platter while all the other contestants watch in envy.
Yahoo has reached out to Channel 4 for further comment.
Come Dine With Me is streaming on Channel 4.