A vampire substitute teacher walks into a bar...
Okay, so not the beginning of a great joke but, as it turns out, it was the beginning of a romance on last night's First Dates Ireland.
The show has a sterling reputation for making almost too-on-the-nose matches, whether it's two young daters with the same fervent passion for cars, or their exact type on paper. Rarely do the matchmakers put a foot wrong, and it seems that even when they pair a couple that look to be opposites, they're still bang on.
Such was the case with Barry and Jennifer, who almost stole the show in an episode that was elsewhere full of wince-inducing puns, saucy banter and a near-miss with a dodgy card machine.
Jennifer, 43, a tour guide from Waterford bloomed onto the screen right away, standing out in a bright floral 50s-style dress and charming everyone from maitre'd Mateo to the servers in the restaurant.
"I've gotten very old-fashioned in my older days", she says. "At the moment I think there's an epidemic of tracksuit wearing. There's not enough support for the equipment lads!"
Speaking about her date, she said, "I wouldn't mind if he matched me! Maybe a little waistcoat, a nice little beard."
Enter Barry, miraculously wearing a waistcoat but bearing barely any other similarity to Jennifer, on the surface at least. "I think I can come across as very strange", he said. "But that doesn't bother me."
Barry, 46, a writer from Tipperary described his style as "vampire substitute teacher". Maybe, he added, "Victorian magician". If that wasn't clear enough, he reiterated his sartorial stance to Jennifer by calling it "homeless vampire".
"If she looked a bit gothy, we'd be doing well. If she looked like she was on her way to a Nine Inch Nails concert, that's gonna work", he said about Jennifer, someone who looks like the polar opposite of someone at a Nine Inch Nails concert.
She's so different, in fact, that her party trick is that she can whistle exactly like a songbird, much to the delight of every other diner in the First Dates restaurant.
The differences didn't stop there. When chatting about their lives the pair made the discovery that they were perhaps an introvert-extrovert couple.
"I don't leave the house very much", Barry said. "I have been known to leave the house to go to Tesco, but that's about it. I'm a creature of the indoors, and I think if she is also similarly an indoors creature that will be helpful."
Jennifer, meanwhile, had spent her earlier years travelling, first moving to London at 18, then onward to Australia for a year. "When I was there I said, will I go home or will keep going? So I got a job on a cruise ship! It sounds like it's completely made up", she laughed.
"I'm not for everyone", she added. "But that's okay. I'd prefer to be someone's shot of whiskey than everyone's cup of tea."
She eventually went on to learn Spanish and Italian and taught English in Spain. Suddenly, Barry reveals a lick of Spanish. "I lived in California for six years", he told his date. "I never learned Spanish, I never tried to learn Spanish but one day I was listening to Telemundo and I knew what they were saying, just from living in California.
As the date went on, they shared more about their lives, with Barry revealing he'd been married twice before and gleaned many lessons from both. "It turns out people drift apart", he said.
"I was a very poor communicator at the time. I've learned to just say things instead of thinking in the background that maybe it doesn't matter. It does.
"I don't have any room for bitterness or resentment in my heart. You have to make yourself vulnerable and take the risk that when you're open-hearted with someone there's always a chance that they're going to just trash the place. There's nothing you can do about it, you can't not be open with people."
It doesn't take long for the pair to realise they share a love for culture and creativity, and have the same intellectual curiosity. When asked whether she reads, Jennifer named The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as one of her favourites.
As if by fate's design, Barry had another of the Russian's books with him on the date, almost proving that the matchmakers can do no wrong.
"Like myself, he'd be a black sheep, a little bit different kind of person", Jennifer said after her date. "I do like a man in a waistcoat. There's a lot to be said for a nice waistcoat."
The couple rounded off their date with drinks at The Writer's Lounge, and continued to swap book recommendations.
Watch First Dates Ireland on Thursdays at 9:30pm on RTÉ2.
