HESTON does (food) porn is what Heston’s Recipe for Romance (Channel 4, Monday, 9pm) should have been called.

The theme of the show is Heston Blumenthal’s quest to make the perfect romantic dinner for five couples at various stages of the relationship cycle to spice up their life, so to speak, and formulating results by asking the couples to use Sternberg’s Triangular Love Scale to rank their connection to their partner. After all, if there is one thing love is, it is being expressable in a percentage format.

This is a cookery show in the same way Top Gear is a show about motoring – the food being made is rather out of the reach of your average homecook. Unless you happen to have your kitchen fitted with a laboratory.

But what it is is a social experiment to see how food affects a relationship and the point is hammered home to us as numerous experts in neuroscience, psychology and a 'mind reader’ talk about how our minds work, help create the food and then turn voyeurs to see what happens in something approaching Big Brother meeting an old Marks and Spencers food advert.

What basically happens is each of the couples get more and more touchy feely and emotionally expressive with one another – you know, how relationships probably should work – after ingesting artfully created chocolate, chilli, champagne, scallops and caviar, as well as smelling napkins infused with their partners scent which was... unusual. Either way, it seemed to work with one older gent expressing how aroused he was and a young couple using a lot of tongue.

At the end, Heston explains to us all that he doesn’t think food can create romance (which rather makes a mockery of the name of the show), but 'it brings people together’. And to prove it, the immediate advert after the end of the show was the one about how KFC proves to be the key to get an adopted boy to integrate into his new family. Wonderful.

Anyway, after the meal, the couples eulogise what they have been through and then went home and, probably, had magnificent sex as they were so happy and loved up, but they gradually fell back into their same respective ruts as that is what humans are like. Happy Valentine’s Day!

What I’m Looking Forward To This Week

Indian Summers (Channel 4, Sundays, 9pm).