What would you sacrifice for reality TV?
The previous day, Jamie had admitted he would consider Love Island despite already having a girlfriend.
Scott and Chris wanted examples from people who had gone further.
Had anybody actually ended a relationship because a television opportunity appeared?
The answer was yes.
A relationship ended for Take Me Out
An anonymous caller said he had applied for *Take Me Out* while single.
By the time the producers came back to him, circumstances had changed.
He had met somebody and they had been together for around five or six months.
Then he was accepted onto the programme.
He broke up with his girlfriend.
Scott asked the obvious question: was he choosing the chance of television exposure, or genuinely hoping to meet somebody better?
The caller admitted it was “a bit of both”.
He had not told his girlfriend when they started dating that a *Take Me Out* application was still sitting in the background.
Once the opportunity became real, he chose the show.
He explained some of the audition process too.
Prospective contestants had gone through a mock version of the programme in a hotel room, complete with representations of the women on the wall. He was questioned about relationships, asked to perform and tested to see whether he would work on television.
He made the programme, got a date and eventually went to Fernando’s.
That relationship lasted only around two or three weeks.
The woman he met later moved to Australia.
The original girlfriend had therefore been dumped for a television romance which lasted a fraction of the time.
One man discovered the truth by watching television
Another story had an even more brutal reality-TV ending.
Becky, calling from Australia, described a friend who had been in a relationship for roughly a year.
His girlfriend then appeared on Australian *Big Brother*.
On television, she described herself as single.
That was how he discovered the relationship was apparently over.
There had been no ordinary breakup conversation before the programme gave him the information.
Scott and Chris were amazed by the idea of finding out that your own girlfriend considered herself single at the same moment as thousands of television viewers.
Reality television made ordinary dating look simple
The stories turned the usual argument about Love Island applicants into something more concrete.
There were people who had genuinely treated a television place as more important than a current relationship.
Scott did not pretend the callers were representative of everybody who went on reality TV.
But after one man admitted ending a six-month relationship for *Take Me Out*, and another had apparently discovered his breakup through *Big Brother*, the phrase “would you go on Love Island if you were taken?” no longer sounded completely hypothetical.
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