Kissed a couple of girls.

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1. Are you guys friends? - yeah, I took her out a couple of times but we are just good friends - well yeah, but are you kissing?

If there wasn't a camera on them, I'd expect that to be "but are you fucking?" But the whole point of Made In Chelsea is that it's super-rich kids, so it's possible that kissing is used euphemistically that way by that class.

they are always trying to kind of bring up the question of whether their meeting and a bit of chat is 'a date' or is it 'not a date'

I think that's an artefact of the programme - the nature of the constructed reality shows is in the relationships, so everyone in them is basically turning their love-lives into a full-time occupation, and they have to imply there is chemistry and possibility between pretty much every possible male-female pairing in the programme. I think most people have had a "Uh, is this a date or just a not-date?" situation at least once in their lives, but it's not like a weekly occurence!

Friends with benefits is a relatively new term (since the late 90s, originally US, I'd say?) The less polite version for when you're not on TV and your mum's not around is fuckbuddies.

Yes, "feelings" is standard for "romantically interested in". "Fancy" is standard for "is sexually interested in" (definitely used in Britain and Ireland and possibly Australia and New Zealand? Not sure where else.) Again, I think it's the kind of conversation that normal people have every so often, but the characters in constructed soaps have constantly, and the same with the "relationship" thing. The stereotype is that all women want relationships and all men are scared of them, and the programme ridiculously exaggerates that to create conflict. Commitment of any kind signals the start of a Relationship, as opposed to a Friends With Benefits arrangement where either party can see other people and walk away at any time.

Thanks a lot.

"The less polite version for when you're not on TV and your mum's not around.." - yep, this one I'm familiar with

As for "kissing" - they do use "have sex" and "sleep with" in other parts of the show, so I did not perceive "kissing" as a euphemism standing for "fuck", rather as a valid expression in its own right in their lingo.
And also - a boy and a girl meet after a few weeks apart, and she's asking how he's been. "Kissed a couple of girls" was part of his response, and I think it would be unlikely, even off camera, not appropriate to say "fucked a couple of girls" even to a "friend with benefits", too crude and abrupt, quite uncalled for

Yeah, "fucked a couple of girls" would be pretty crude. I wouldn't be particularly shocked if it was a response to a male friend asking the same question, though. I was reading the first example as between two men, in which case "yes, but are you kissing?" sounds very quaintly euphemistic. If it's a girl asking a boy, then it's a bit more naturally euphemistic.

I'm English, live in London and many of my schoolmates were from Chelsea.
Even though the last time I was in a Chelsea bar was for my 20-year school reunion this summer, it all sounds quite plausible to me.

I'm not sure I quite understand your confusion,so I'll explain a bit about relationship culture in the UK vs US (stereotypical versions of both...)
Kissing is kissing. We can assume it's not a peck on the cheek to say hello because these women and half the men will do that, probably while saying 'mwah' loudly. They're talking about kissingon the mouth, probably with tongues (snogging, to use a common UK term).

Basically Brits don't 'date' the way Americans do. I blame my American mother for making me polyamorous thanks to her trying to understand the Brit usage of the word 'date' and responding to me aged 13 being shocked that someone might date two different people, telling me that of course you could 'date' multiple people at the same time. Thing is we used 'date' in different ways.

US date = pretty much any meeting with one person, romantic, potentially romantic, sometimes just to pass the time even if you have no romantic intentions. Americans will say "it's a date" to agree to pretty much any meeting even of friends. I wouldn't be surprised to hear someone talking about a date with their dentist even though I don't think it would be usual to do so.

UK date = always with sexual connotations. You might have a hot date on a Saturday night, a first/second/third/blind date, but if you're calling it a date, you are signalling your intentions. And if you are having dates with one person, having a 'date' with someone else in between is being a two-timing bitch/bastard - unless you are into polyamory.

So does this mean Brits have a first date, decide if there's going to be a second and therefore they're in a relationship right then and there? Sometimes - and alcohol has a lot to do with that. More usually, people meet up with others under all sorts of pretexts to get to know each other (I lost count of how many times as a student my housemates had to throw a party because someone had casually invited someone to one!), which fulfils the same functions as the first few dates in Hollywood versions of America. So by the time you get to a first date, you're pretty much expecting a relationship. Before that you have plausible deniability of any emotions!

Part of pre-dating includes going out clubbing, when the aim is to get drunk, possibly take drugs, and often snog someone, possibly take them home for a shag. If it doesny end up with sa date, it can be brushed off as 'just a kiss'. Deniability to avoid embarrassment is key.

If you want to read more on English dating practises, get Watching the English by Kate Fox, which analyses English life in even more detail than above, broken down by class as well!

thanks to her trying to understand the Brit usage of the word 'date' and responding to me aged 13 being shocked that someone might date two different people, telling me that of course you could 'date' multiple people at the same time.

I definitely think there's a difference between the noun "date" in US/UK English, as you described, but I don't think there's a difference in the verb, which you used in the sentence above. I very much doubt your mother was encouraging you to be in two monogamous relationships at the same time (maybe you misunderstood?), because Americans--unless they're poly, which isn't the 'norm'--wouldn't date multiple people at the same time. But they might go out on several dates with different people over a narrow span of time, because a 'date' can be reasonably casual. If you're 'dating', however, that's a relationship.

Oh yes, absolutely I misunderstood, but a Brit wouldn't do that 'dates with different people over a narrow span of time' either - or rather, wouldn't call it having dates. Good point about the difference between noun and verb usage.

US date = pretty much any meeting with one person, romantic, potentially romantic, sometimes just to pass the time even if you have no romantic intentions. Americans will say "it's a date" to agree to pretty much any meeting even of friends. I wouldn't be surprised to hear someone talking about a date with their dentist even though I don't think it would be usual to do so.
We do say "it's a date," and someone might say "I have a date with the dentist" for humorous effect, but no one would ever seriously call a platonic outing a date. (And "it's a date" is an idiomatic phrase which I'm pretty sure has a separate origin from that of [romantic] date.)

but no one would ever seriously call a platonic outing a date

Funnily, though, Japanese people call it that all the time. Then again, they also call romantic outings dates as well, though, so it can be really confusing when two guys say they went out on a date and you're not sure if that means they just hung out as friends or more-than-friends...

Actually, come to think of it, most of the stuff is universal, even if it is expressed differently in different cultures.

That inability for a young male to bear embarrassment or outright humiliation of rejection - and the need to hide it socially from others, when it occurs, - seems to be a pretty well-known phenomenon, everywhere. Therefore we get the procedure of not calling a date a date and using pretexts, common activities etc for the first stages of the game.
In English they seem to be freer with the "date" word, in Russian the word itself will be avoided very often, while some other equivalent like "seeing someone" (literally "meeting") would get substituted to sound a bit less mm.. "cringy". And the pattern of "not dating" until some later point when you already do not have a need to hide anything, and are officially "together", should not be surprising at all.

So, yep, plausible deniability definitely does play a part in all this, I'd agree.

Not all classes and groups behave the same way, naturally, and possibly there are even places where courting is conducted more along the lines of "If ya wanna root just ask" (however hard that would be to believe), but I think it's pretty much on the biological level, essentially, and some peculiar language is only a sort of external expression of it.

Re "friends with benefits", Alanis Morisette used it in "Head over Feet", which came out in 1995. She's Canadian/Amarican. That song immediatly came to mind when seeing the question. :)

Actually, I've just checked it in Wikipedia. They have a disambiguation page with 7 (seven!) films or sitcoms, all it seems produced after 2000. Obviously the phrase became quite popular in teh 2000s.
So it looks lile you are pointing at something closer to the source of it

Very interested in the UK usages here, as I'm North American and only know how things are used over here. That said, it doesn't sound like most of what you've listed would be very unusual over here.

And in my experience non-heterosexual interactions tend to use the same words, for what that's worth. Though how closely hetero and queer romantic cultures resemble each other does vary. Anyway--dates, dating, relationships, "is this a date-date or not a date?" are pretty much the same for whoever.

check the thekumquat's comment above
http://linguaphiles.livejournal.com/5868042.html?thread=110331402
which lays out the grand strategy of British dating in the last paragraphs, quite illuminating I think