The love bug Why reality TV is hooked on romance
There’s no denying reality TV hits such as Married At First Sight capture our imagination, but there is a dark side. So why would anyone appear on one? Ingrid Pyne goes behind the scenes to find out.
Before there were women like Snezana Markoski, who won Sam Wood’s heart on season three of The Bachelor, or Lauren Brant, the runaway bride from Married At First Sight, there was Harriet Lawson.
Harriet – now a 50-year-old Sydney midwife – was a university student when, in 1986, she successfully auditioned for Perfect Match, the classic ’80s dating game show.
It wasn’t love Harriet was seeking. “I felt relieved when the man – I can’t remember his name, but he was an engineer with brown hair – picked the cake decorator from Queensland,” she tells The Weekly. “It would have been a bit much to go overseas scuba diving with someone I had just met.”
Nor was it the prizes. “I won a Chester the Cat character phone.”
No, what really attracted Harriet – decked out in a gold taffeta bell skirt she’d splurged on – was the glitter of the small screen. “I just wanted to be on telly,” she admits. “I was young, silly and looking for excitement. It could have been any show.”
Yet Perfect Match wasn’t just any show. For half an hour each weekday night, captivated viewers got to watch ordinary Australians – not actors or public figures – have a go at picking their perfect love match “live” on TV, their choice validated or debunked by Dexter the Robot’s “compatibility score”. The couple then headed off on a romantic weekend, film crew in tow, with the holiday footage and tell-all interviews all going to air.
It was escapism, it was voyeurism, it was humorous – and it was a primitive prototype for a whole new genre of television. “It was really dating reality television before there was dating reality television,” muses Harriet. “The name ‘reality television’ hadn’t even been invented back then.” By the time Perfect Match ended in 1989, our love affair with dating shows seemed like an artefact of an older, more innocent Australia. Attempts at reviving the format – Blind Date in 1991 and a revamp of Perfect Match in 2002 – didn’t come within cooee of the original’s success. Then, in October 2007, came a series which pushed the format back into prime time: The Farmer Wants A Wife. The Weekly began