Cilla was the only winner on 'Blind Date'

People have cried in public over some pretty odd things, but one of the oddest must be Blind Date. When Miss Cilla Black burst into tears on Saturday night while announcing her retirement from the long-running show, there could have been no neater demonstration of the truth that the world may be prepared to laugh with you, but weep, and you weep alone. One looked at the spectacle with fascination, but without the slightest temptation to join in or to agree that, yes, this was truly sad. TV host leaves show; show continues; host weeps in public, live. Your response, at best, was "hmm, interesting".

Though Cilla Black was forever doing common things and mean, at least she resembled Charles I in one crucial way: nothing in her professional life became her like the leaving of it. It was a ceremonial departure of delirious vulgarity. First, she went in secret to a psychic, who said as soon as she came in: "Bobby" (her late husband) "says you are doing the right thing." Brilliant psychic powers; or perhaps the psychic just read The Sun. Anyway, Miss Black didn't tell anyone she was leaving in advance, but simply announced it on a special live edition to – we are asked to believe – the stunned disbelief of the production team, before promptly going all weepy. Triff.

For years, Blind Date has been an obsession of the intelligentsia, who, though notoriously indifferent to documentaries on Dostoevsky, adore total candy-floss TV. By now, with the viewing figures down to just over a third of the show's highpoint of 17 million, they probably make up most of the audience. Long and vicious arguments may be had at Islington dinner parties over such burning issues as whether there really are three holidays to choose from, whether the duller pickees have their answers scripted for them and whether couples have actually had sex on their dates.

Me, I love it, and the idiotically predictable rhythms of the show. The picker is a complete slapper, of either sex. The pickees always include one slightly frumpy person doing his or her best (who gets ditched), one complete embarrassment who the audience roots for (a loud fat girl or a boy wearing plastic breasts), and one sexy beast. Off they go, either to the National Tram Museum at Crich or to Barbados. The outcome is generally the same; in each other's company, they have nothing at all to say ("Look at that fish"). When discussing the other, they open up to, often, a very enjoyable extent. "He didn't know how to treat a lady," the girl will wail, and, in our house at least, we retort: "I hadn't noticed the question had arisen."

Very watchable, and massively enhanced by the tantalising persona of the host. Cilla isn't remotely smutty, and sails serenely over any double-entendre or hint of debauchery; rather (and this is the very English thing) she is both cosy and, somehow, unspeakably grand. She is one of those rich professional Liverpudlians who live in Weybridge and, if they slum it, do so in a louche Soho nightspot such as the Shadow Lounge. Her Liverpool accent is exactly that of 40 years ago, leading to suspicions that that was the last time she went near the place. On television she lets perfect strangers call her Cilla and alludes to the pleasures of cups of tea; in real life, you can be damned sure that her staff call her nothing but Mrs Willis and tremble in case the Krug is a degree or two too warm.

The interesting thing is that both sides of this are part of the public persona, and the reason it works so well is that, like the contestants haplessly sent off to see if lechery will strike under the silvery moon, the viewers have the sense of knowing someone intimately and yet not knowing them at all. She is the one complicated and ambiguous character in a show that, otherwise, reduces anyone who wants to succeed to a single, probably completely fake constituent of personality. Everyone has agreed to become an outrageous tart, a boffin, a posh berk or a slimeball; no one is allowed to deviate from the standard line initially taken on their personality. If the audience feels that they understand the contestants as soon as they open their mouths, or even before that, they are fascinated by the sense that at one moment, the host seems their friend, at the next Lady Muck riding past in her Rolls.

There isn't really any obvious candidate to replace Cilla and bring off this difficult balancing act; perhaps they ought to conclude that the show was just about her and bring it to a suitably undignified end. The thing one loves best about the show is the thinly veiled irony that, in an age addicted to turning anything, even falling in love, into a competition, the people who have really won that competition are not those who enter them, but those who supervise the struggle. You watch her faking enthusiasm as some couple learns that they're off to New York, and all the time you see the knowledge in her face that she, Mrs Willis, could do that whenever she chose.

p.hensher@independent.co.uk