Dating show with heart an antidote to franchise hell

The Undateables aims to help people with various impairments find a partner.

Courage of participants in The Undateables incredibly moving

I approached The Undateables with a sense of dread. The promos aired for weeks, showing people - some short, some disfigured, some in wheelchairs - all united by their desire to find love. The title made the show seem unconscionably cruel: a modern freakshow, and an opportunity for those for whom life has come easy to have a good belly laugh at those for whom it's far harder.

In lesser hands it might've ended up that way. I can imagine a similar show coming out of a more brutal culture - say Australia or the US - being a quite different proposition. But The Undateables comes from England, an occasionally green and sometimes pleasant land which, UKIP aside, has a vein of sympathy and inclusiveness to which all nations should aspire.

Each episode follows a group of three or four individuals with various impairments as they sign up with dating agencies. They've been single for periods varying between years and decades, and have decided to try to find a partner. And do it on national television.

The courage and generosity of these people is incredibly moving. We meet Penny, a 0.9m tall trapeze artist so fragile that the only bones she's never broken are her nose and collarbone. There's Richard, a CB radio enthusiast with Asperger's, who goes "for months without anyone coming into this flat even". Luke has Tourette's, a tic which amplifies with nerves, and finds himself yelling unfortunate obscenities at women. They don't tend to like it much.

The show's protagonists approach this most innate and intimate of desires with determination, black humour, or unbridled joy. The very act of admitting love is missing in their lives seems to be liberating, and watching their often awkward, occasionally wildly successful dates has an emotional heft to it. This is particularly acute and revelatory if you have, like me, spent recent months watching various Bachelor franchises and forgotten how sweet and stumbling the process can be without candles and champagne.

In the second episode we meet Justin, a nice, cat-loving man with large tumours constantly growing on his face and body. He's never been out with a woman, and represents a unique challenge for his agency, thanks to a face distorted like a funhouse mirror. Even his dating rep, normally ceaselessly upbeat, admits to doubts about finding a woman willing to look past his tumours.

After some weeks he opens a letter, once again expressing sorrow at their inability to bring a match. "I'm obviously too hard to pick for," he says. "I'm going to be a single bachelor boy for the rest of me life."

It's grim. Then his phone rings. The agency has found Tracy, owner of a dozen cats and dogs, who liked the sound of him. "There's still a person in there," she says. By the episode's end they've met, and hit it off. It's one of the most poignant televisual moments I've seen all year, and The Undateables, appalling name aside, is superb.

So too is another TVNZ reality series, the just-launched Keeping Up With the Kaimanawas. As the name implies, it's from here, not there, and the punsome title is oddly accurate in distilling this charming show's essential nature. It follows Vicki, Kelly and Amanda Wilson, three sisters from Hukurenui in Northland who train showjumping horses.

Like their Kardashian namesakes, it drills into the relationships and work of the women, with the men they interact with reduced to cyphers, useful only insofar as they facilitate the sisters' mission. The Wilson's work is truly admirable: they take the most difficult horses, those too difficult, too lame, or too old, and save them from the grim fate which would otherwise await them.

The series begins with their selecting 15 wild horses from the Kaimanawa ranges in the central North Island, a herd which gallops free across this scorched terrain, shown in a series of outrageously beautiful aerial shots. Every few years the military conducts a cull to keep the numbers at a sustainable level, and the Wilsons head down to carve off a selection of the most unlikely specimens - ancient, injured, dreadlocked creatures - and cart them off up north to school.

That alone would probably make for worthy but dull television. But the homeschooled sisters have a winningly unaffected demeanour on camera, and their characters - Vicki's machinelike work ethic, Kelly's irresistible persuasiveness, Amanda's wilful energy - mesh with an engaging mixture of affection and exasperation. It feels like a natural-born New Zealand original from episode one.

It was also a relief. After months happily cueing up hit after hit after hit of the slow poison of TV3's singing, loving and dancing monoliths, these shows were an antidote - real humans conducting their beautiful lives without a master franchise owner's puppetry.

It felt good.