LOVE, VIRTUALLY

Channel 4 · TV Rating · 16 Jul 2010 · by: Channel 4

The First Cut strand, showcasing bold, bright and original films by up-and-coming directors, presents Rosie Walsh's Love Virtually , exploring the fascinating world of love in the digital age.

Virtual love has never been bigger. In 2010, seven million of us will sign up for internet dating, a fifth of whom will find love online, and 12 million dates will be organised online. Dating websites are no longer stigmatised as a weird pastime for young people, and nearly two thirds of over-55s who are single are now using them. Matchmaking websites have clearly added a new dimension to dating. And the internet has completely changed how people conduct their love lives, from long-distance relationships and keeping tabs on a crush, to obsessing about exes… and partners' exes.

Lucy Robinson is a growing sensation in the blogging world. Her online diary, The Final Countdown , entertains thousands of marieclaire.co.uk readers with its frank and humorous tales from the frontline of internet dating. Lucy spares no detail of her cyber-love adventures, confessing freely to rampant internet stalking and imaginary love affairs with men she's never even met. In Love Virtually , actress Claire Wood portrays Lucy in a fictional documentary, at critical moments in her cyber love life: her first internet dates, her secret stalking of her new boyfriend and her heartbroken weeks with only the internet for company when it all goes wrong.

As well as following Lucy's experiences, the documentary interviews several other date-savvy women, some of whom have found happy endings both through online dating and from the "real world". All, however, deliver disarmingly frank accounts of life as internet daters, relating such shocks as the 6'2" fireman who stood up and revealed himself to be little more than five feet high, or the "fit bloke" who turned out to be a "grey old man" of 65. With hilarious retrospective stories and very insightful views on the strange world of virtual love, the women reveal the extent to which the internet has influenced and interfered with modern love.
This film provides an absorbing and comical glimpse of love in the 21st century: a time where new relationships are very often three-way affairs between man, woman… and the internet. After all, why sit around in a hedge with a long-lens camera when you can find out all you need to know at the click of a mouse?