Airing in the small hours of the night, Davina McCall presented 'God's Gift' - a cross between the ubiquitous 'Blind Date' format, and a 24-pack of beer. A studio audience composed of excitable 18-24 year old women would pass judgement on four young men performing a tournament of challenges to prove their worth and that they were 'God's Gift to women' - "the twelve tasks of Hofmeister" sort of thing. The challenges included a feat of strength, joke telling, dancing, and so forth, and the contestants were whittled down round-by-round. Finally the audience would select their winner, who would choose a woman from the crowd with whom to have a date. A la Blind Date, Davina would feature highlights from their (invariably chaotic) date in each subsequent show.
'God's Gift' was by no means quality television, but its strength lay in the fact that it knew it wasn't, and was honest about the fact that it was post-nightclub/drinking television for post-nightclub/drinking people. Davina McCall (now more famous for her matriarch role on the UK's 'Big Brother') was the mother-hen to the often uncontrollably animated audience, herding them from corner to corner, and performed admirably, making a pretty dreadful lowest-common-denominator format quite watchable.
It was cheap and it made you laugh, and as 1996 3am television goes, it was all the more watchable for that refreshing honesty.
