Lisa Fewster, 28, is standing in the middle of a room, blindfolded, waiting to kiss a man. "They leave you there to get that bit of suspense in your little stomach," she says. "Then you hear the door opening and you hear someone shuffling in. It's extremely nerve-racking. You can feel the guy is in the room and you know people are watching you. We're not allowed to speak. You put your arms out and you walk and you hope to God that you find them.

"The experiment is about how you feel from kissing, but you do have other senses – you can feel to get an idea of how tall they are. One guy was really nervous and I could almost feel his whole body shaking. Some guys would really grab you, but I remember one guy, he held my hand at the end, and that little squeeze was quite comforting."

Chris Bateman, 24, started his latest relationship the same way – blindfolded, awaiting the arrival, one by one, of 12 women, also blindfolded, who kissed him. Some of them went quite long, some were short," he says. "A couple of them got a bit handsy, both myself and the girls. I brushed my teeth so many times that day. I didn't want to come off as a smelly breath guy. I wanted to be as hygienic as possible."

Fewster and Bateman were contestants on Kiss Bang Love, the latest manifestation of the fad for dating shows that has overwhelmed commercial television. The trend started two years ago with the success of The Bachelor, then last year with The Bachelorette and Married At First Sight. It continued this year with First Dates and Seven Year Switch. All of them possess a mysterious power to deliver to advertisers the elusive 16- to 39-demographic – people who don't watch dramas and rarely watch cooking, singing or renovating.

Now comes Kiss Bang Love, the fastest and frankest dating show of all. The contestants choose their five best kissing experiences, have a brief chat with them (unblindfolded), kiss again, then spend 24 hours with their two favourites, including the offer of two hotel rooms. Sex is optional. Finally they choose one to take on an all-expense-paid holiday. Marriage and happy-ever-after is also optional.

Dr Trisha Stratford, a neuroscientist who is a consultant to Married At First Sight, wonders whether these shows are so successful because desperate young people are using television for advice on how to negotiate love.

"We all want to learn how to do relating better, everyone does," Stratford says. "I get questions from people I don't even know, from 14 to 75, wanting to know about relationships.

"I think that this type of observational documentary, Channel Nine-style, is actually how people learn. Maybe it's the new way of doing things, the jury's still out on that. I was prepared to be part of it because it seems to be how particularly young people learn today. You can observe people doing relationships in situ."

Kiss Bang Love is The Bachelor/Bachelorette on speed. Instead of taking 12 weeks to determine who their life partner will be, the contestants take three days.

Bateman, who runs an online scented-candle store called Nude Dudes Candles, got involved after he was approached at the races in Melbourne by a talent scout from Channel Seven who asked if he was single. He'd been an avid viewer of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette but never thought of himself as a potential participant.

"I always wanted to go on a show like The Amazing Race," he says. "But I'm not going to say no. Unless I'm with someone, I'm pretty open to trying new things. It's a good story to tell and who knows, you might meet someone that you love and marry."

He agrees with Dr Stratford's theory that young adults use television to learn what to do and what not to do in romance.

"We take some pointers from it, but you do know it's television. Before going into this, I didn't know what to believe, but everything we did on camera was just natural and it is a thing in our generation now to take our cues and social norms from that sort of stuff."

To avoid spoilers, Bateman won't say whether his relationship lasted beyond the holiday. Fewster, a hospitality worker who applied for the show after seeing an ad on late-night television, told me she'd spent the night in the same room as one of her two finalists, then chose him as her holiday partner. They have not broken up.

"Both the boys met me at the airport, and you have to choose one, but it's not nice when you have two people in front of you," she says. "In other shows, they've already spent this amount of time together, whereas the lighthearted thing about this show is you haven't spent all that much time with them, so they're not going to be ridiculously sad if you don't choose them. I'm really lucky because the guy I chose was a great guy. In some form, it's continuing."

Kiss Bang Love starts on Tuesday, May 24, at 8.45pm on Channel Seven.

A farewell to charms

The executioner stalked the corridors of America's television networks last week, applying the axe to more than 20 series, some of which are beloved by Australians.Not even the charms of Kylie Minogue were enough to save Galavant, which was axed by the US's ABC after two seasons. That was the series where Kylie famously met her future husband Joshua Sasse, but he won't need too much comforting because he's found work on a new dramedy about the apocalypse called No Tomorrow, which will start in October.

Not even the talents of our own Melissa George and Don Hany were enough to save Heartbeat, the hospital drama that is being advertised on the sides of buses in Sydney (and currently airing on Foxtel's Universal channel). It will not proceed to a second season in the US.

Melissa George as Dr Alex Panttiere and Don Hany as Dr Jesse Shane in the series Heartbeat. Photo: NBC

When the original CSI was axed last year, Ted Danson moved to CSI: Cyber, but now he's lost his job there, along with Patricia Arquette. The great survivor will join Kristen Bell in a comedy about the afterlife called The Good Place. Danson will play a kind of angel, which is a long stride from the self-centred Sam Malone, the Cheers character who made him famous.

Nathan Fillion reacted to the cancellation of his eight-year-old detective dramedy Castle by sending two tweets into cyberspace: "Dear Every Director, it appears I have an opening in my schedule" followed by "Dear fans, In whatever project I do next, loudly notice how unlike Castle and fresh and versatile I am."

In its prime, Castle used to attract more than a million viewers in the Australian capitals (though now it's down to 330,000) but the lost fans will want to return for the finale, because earlier this year the producer, Alexi Hawley, guaranteed Entertainment Weekly the writers would offer closure."If we hear that we're not coming back, we have shot something that we can put at the end of the episode as a way to put a button on everything," Hawley said. "Obviously that would be a bad thing, because it would mean no more. We did it in order to try to protect the fans, because you can't end the series on a cliffhanger."

The final two episodes of Castle air on Monday, May 23, at 9.50pm on Seven.

Eat locally, think globally

Rene Redzepi on Noma Australia. Photo: SBS

Ever so politely, the Danish chef Rene Redzepi has hinted there may be a touch of racism in the failure, until recently, of white Australians to embrace ingredients that are native to this country.Redzipi's restaurant Noma (named by some guides as the best in the world) has just moved back to its home in Copenhagen after a 10-week stint in Sydney. SBS made a documentary about his time here, which is showing on Wednesday nights. This column was allowed to email some questions to Redzepi, and here's what we got back (with the sting in the second answer):

Q: What did you learn during your time in Sydney that will change your approach to cooking, now that you're back home?

Redzepi: "There's too many lessons learned from the almost six months I spent over the last year in Australia. One thing that I'm going to plan here is to go on a discovery journey again in my region with the same curiosity and determination and excitement like we had when we went through our two months of research trips in Australia."

Q: Why do you think white Australians have been so slow to adopt this country's ingredients as part of their cooking?

Redzepi: "That's a very difficult question to answer. One simple answer is that the ingredients are very hard to get, they're more expensive typically; but that doesn't answer why there hasn't been much development over a couple hundred years with the native flora. I've read many papers on it actually, I guess it's a topic for local Australians to get into ... it could have something to do with the idea that, by eating a people's food, you also accept the culture."

Q: What are the Australian ingredients you found most satisfying to work with? Are any of them suitable for home cooks?

Redzepi: "The finger lime. I wish we could have it in Denmark. It's a perfect ingredient suitable for anybody, and any dish, in any part of any menu."

Q: Your menu included "fermented kangaroo"? How did your Australian customers react to it? Is this a technique that works with all other red meat, or is kangaroo particularly suited to the process?

Redzepi: "You can do it with all red meats, although meats that have a lot of fat in them tend to ferment slightly worse. So with kangaroo it worked really well because it's very lean."

Q: Did you get time to eat out much in Sydney, and if so, which places did you enjoy?

Redzepi: "There were many great places, from Belle's Hot Chicken and Edition Roasters, places like Billy Kwong and Spice Temple, or Momofuku Seiobo. The Asian food in Australia, and Sydney in particular, is amazing."

Noma Australia, a three-part series, is on Thursdays at 7.30pm on SBS.

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