As narrator of reality show ' Come Dine With Me', Dave Lamb has seen his share of dining disasters. As the first Irish episode airs tonight, he talks drunken guests and bad entertainment with ROSITA BOLAND

Come Dine With Mehas finally arrived in Ireland – almost seven years after the wildly popular reality television programme based on rotating dinner parties first aired on Channel 4 in Britain.

For those who are not familiar with Come Dine With Me, it sees four (sometimes five) strangers in the same town hosting a dinner party by turn in their house over four or five consecutive nights. They receive a catering budget of £125 for the night (€125 for Irish contestants), which they can add to as they wish.

Guests are encouraged to poke around the house on arrival while the host is busy in the kitchen. The host’s bedroom is usually scrutinised, often with deeply strange objects left around to be accidentally-on-purpose discovered.

Hundreds of contestants around Britain have appeared on more than 1,000 episodes of CDWM, as it’s known, since 2005. But the one constant presence in all of them has been the distinctive, sarcastic, gleeful voiceover commentary of Dave Lamb. From show to show, through kitchen disasters, drunken guests, rude guests, flirting hosts and incontinent pets, Lamb has unflinchingly narrated the story of each dinner party.

Dinner itself must include starter, main course, dessert, sometimes preceded with canapes, and always served up with copious amounts of alcohol. More recent series have also featured after-dinner “entertainment”. This can range from the host attempting to sing or doing stand-up, to friends juggling fire in the back garden, teaching dance moves, reading your tarot cards or well, anything, really. Guests score their host out of 10 on the food and how much they enjoyed the evening. The contestant with the highest score at the end of the week wins £1,000. Or €1,000, as is the case in Ireland.

Come Dine With Mehas been franchised around the world, and there are some intriguing cultural insights to be observed in the way different countries have translated the original title of the show. In Finland, it's called Rate My Dinner; in Hungary, it's Dinner Battle; in Germany, The Perfect Dinner; in France, The Almost Perfect Dinner; Without a Napkinin Slovenia; Half-past Seven At My Placein Sweden; Eight O'Clock At My Placein Norway; Dinner Takes Allin the US; Soireein Russia; Cookedin Poland; and the most accurate description of the show from any country, Tastes Differ, in the Netherlands.

SIX WEEKS OF THE IRISH series have recently been filmed; two in Dublin, and one each in Cork, Galway, Limerick and Waterford. The first to be broadcast will be from Cork, beginning tonight and running over five successive evenings.

Dave Lamb has also done the voiceover for the Irish shows, a fact that is certain to delight fans of the series on this side of the water. Contestants come and go, but Lamb’s acerbic commentary is a consistently entertaining highlight, and a draw in itself.

Over for the day in Dublin from Brighton, where he lives, Lamb is sitting at a table set for 12 in a hotel. Sadly, there’s no dinner party planned here; it’s a conference room. So what’s the real background story to the filming of the series? Do people bad-mouth each other off-camera at 3am? Have they ever had to drop contestants? Does he write his own scripts?

“The success of the show has exceeded all expectations,” he says. “Perhaps it’s because hosting a dinner party is something a lot of people do. So it’s fun to watch from a safe place as a dinner party disintegrates around the host.”

“The crew film hours and hours. They have to know what the story is going to be, and how the show’s attitude to each character will be, so they gather a huge amount of material,” Lamb says. “They usually start at 7am in someone’s house, and they’ll go out shopping with them, watch them cook, and then they have to stay until the night finishes. Sometimes it can be 3am or later.”

A feature of the show is the contestants on their way home in the back of a black cab, holding up score cards for the evening. “A lot of time can be taken up with the cab rides,” he explains. “Because there’s only one cab, and they all take turns – and everyone is usually hammered and they need several takes.”

Can he offer any insight into why people drink so much while being filmed for national television?

Lamb shakes his head, looking genuinely baffled. “You would think they wouldn’t. But they always do.”

Over time, the focus has moved quite a lot from showcasing the food, to the frequent poor behaviour of the guests. “The producers pay a lot of attention to the casting,” he confirms. “It has become more personality-driven and how you deal with conflict.”

Lamb is never on-location himself, and sees only the edited half-hour versions that will go out on air. He doesn’t write the scripts, but he does ad lib lines here and there, which tend to stay in. The scripts and his asides make it abundantly clear to viewers when a contestant is making a fool of themselves.

“I enjoy the gap between how people perceive themselves, and how they are perceived by others. People quite often also are playing the game. Up until they’ve hosted their own night, they can be charming, and then after they’ve done their night, they turn nasty.”

SO HAS ANY CONTESTANT ever complained to him about the way the show was edited and what he said about them as a result? He laughs. “There may be complaints, but they don’t get passed on to me. I’ve never met any of the people on the shows.”

That was, except for this very day, when he met 10 of the Irish contestants from Cork and Dublin, who took part in the first two shows to air.

“Yes, but they’ve not seen the shows yet,” he points out with relief, adding, “I quite often try to make the commentary less cruel.”

So what, if any, cultural differences did he notice between the dinner parties here and in the UK?

“There weren’t as many conflicts [in Ireland]. People all seemed really up for it, and to have fun. And the entertainment was quite different.”

The after-dinner entertainment has become a fixed part of most evenings now, something the contestants themselves, rather than the producers, have pushed for. What kinds of entertainment can we expect to see in the coming weeks?

“Eurovision seems to be big here. There was a Eurovision night, where every course was themed on a song, and there were Eurovision charades afterwards.”

But for him, the oddest “entertainment” was the man with the horse. “One guy finished his night by saying he had a horse outside and ‘let’s go and see if we can find it’,” Lamb recounts with puzzlement. How do you explain what Horse Outside is to someone who thinks a rubber bandit is a type of elastic? Especially when this contestant apparently did have a real horse outside.

And no, in case you were wondering, Lamb has never done an ad-hoc running commentary when he goes out to dinner in friends’ houses.

The first episode of Come Dine With Me, voiced by Dave Lamb, airs on TV3 at 9pm tonight