How best to pay homage to Come Dine With Me? Any tribute to the programme worth its Maldon sea salt would have to reach just a little too far, mess up spectacularly and expose its creator to the sniggering of his peers. In other words, the very stuff of Comment is free.

All that will come in a bit, I promise – but before we get to the high-falutin' stuff, the intimidating Escargots de Bourgogne if you will, let's cover some of the basics.

Because Dine doesn't just provide simple pleasures – it bombards you with them. Picture the scene of the programme's conception: a TV production office called Late Capitalist Entertainment Inc, a bunch of hipsters lolling around in their finest geography-teacher tailoring.

What, asks one 20-something from the depths of his parka, genre shall we make this show? Reality or gameshow, cooking or property? I know, says another Cambridge graduate, while earnestly fingering the suede on his Clarks shoes, why not have bits of all of them?

So was born a programme that distills all the most entertaining bits of each format, and discards all the ponderousness. There are scenes of cooking, but shot with an eye for mishap rather than instruction. You get to nose around different houses, but without the pretence of being taught about DIY. At only a grand (in £20 notes fanned around a dinner plate, because presentation obviously counts), the prize would hardly lift Chris Tarrant's eyebrows. The result is a series of cheap sugar-highs – a programme that may leave you feeling a bit sick afterwards but, hey, it tasted all right going down.

And then there are the contestants. Some are bemusingly odd, but others you wouldn't willingly talk to if your house was on fire and they were manning the 999 call centre.

Seared on my memory is the episode where Johnny, an Eddie Jordan lookalike, snogs a grandmother in front of the other guests, gropes her, then settles back to praise her "juicy lips". What was his game? What was she thinking? Why did no one call the police? Readers, I have no answers – just a YouTube clip that you really don't want to watch.

That feeling of queasiness you can detect above is one the producers encourage. The programme takes that trick from The Office of holding a shot for just a beat after something funny has been said, and mixes it with a sense of slapstick.

In Leicester, a menu from "glamorous ex-dancer" Ria arrives promising a "Parisian Surprise". What can she mean? "Something French, I would think," says Colin. This man claims to be a management consultant. The camera dwells on him in wonder, while the reliably acid narrator Dave Lamb breaks in with "Well done, Einstein". To the programme-makers' evident delight the surprise turns out to be a cancan routine performed in Ria's back garden.

Interviewed by this paper last year, Lamb suggested that Dine's success lay with its contestants – "the gap between who they are and who they think they are". His phrase neatly sums up the show's bigger theme. It's there in the very title with its allusions to Rat Pack glamour, rather than nuclearised meat served up in Doncaster. It's there in the gulf between the hosts' spick-and-span houses and their hidden bottles of self-tanning lotion.

And most of all, it shines out of the contestants themselves. In Preston, Valerie trills to the camera: "My friends think it's pretty wonderful to come round my house for dinner … because my friends adore me." Dave Lamb heckles: "Lucky old friends".

The viewers laugh along with Dave, of course. But the truth is we've all got more in common with Valerie than we'd like.