Alisha Aitken

Jul 04, 2023

Words by Alisha Aitken-Radburn

“The names continued until there were no roses left to give.”

On Sunday, 11 March 2018, my alarm jolted me awake at 5.30am. It was the morning of my flight to Sydney. I had a habit of setting alarms unnecessarily early when I was anxious or unprepared. This morning I was both.

I was booked on QF1474 Canberra to Sydney, departing at 12.05pm. I’d laid two suitcases out on my bedroom floor and they were brimming with piles of clothes assembled by category. Shorts, shirts, skirts and dresses. Another suitcase was stacked with a pile of colourful gowns gently folded in half, still on their hangers.

The packing list from Warner Brothers had specified that we needed to bring a minimum of five dresses appropriate for a cocktail party so I’d spent the last 48 hours negotiating with people on Facebook Marketplace who were selling their old formal dresses, and driving to the far reaches of Canberra to pick them up.

When I landed in Sydney, I was greeted by a very flustered woman called Izzy. She was surrounded by a handful of girls all armed with two suitcases. Izzy was an assistant producer, charged with wrangling us into a white van to take us to our next location. ‘Don’t talk to each other,’ she said with a strong English accent through gritted teeth. ‘You’re not meant to know each other!’ She looked just like one of the producers from the popular series UnREAL, which provided a behind-the-scenes glimpse into a fictitious dating show modelled closely on The Bachelor.

I always thought that the show embellished the truth but here Izzy was, dressed all in black, a walkie-talkie on her hip, earpiece in her ear. In the van, she passed around a pile of black hoodies and instructed us to put them on with the pair of sunglasses we’d been told to pack in our carry-on. Giggles and murmurs of ‘paps’ and ‘the Daily Mail’ reverberated through the van as we awkwardly negotiated getting our limbs into the hoodies in the tight space.

Our next location wasn’t the famous Bachelor mansion as we’d assumed; it was Quest Apartments, a nondescript high-rise in Chatswood in Sydney’s north. We were told we’d be there for three days, holed up in a hotel room with just one other contestant. Three days without our phones, internet or TV.

It was called the sequester. I learnt production sequestered contestants before shooting reality TV shows for a range of reasons. For our season they conducted 28 individual hour-long ‘master’ interviews during which the producers unpicked each element of our personality: they asked us our biggest regrets, whether we considered ourselves competitive and why we were still single. We had meetings with the wardrobe department. And we had a big group briefing about how shooting would work, what the contracts we had all signed meant and what would happen if we broke them.

When the time came for us to meet the Bachelor, a producer mustered me to get into the limo that had been motoring up and reversing back down the same stretch of driveway all night. She told me that I’d have 10 minutes with the Bachelor when I met him, which was far more than I’d expected. I’d thought it would be as brief as it looked on TV – ‘Hello, I’m Alisha, nice to meet you, see you inside’ – and I was panicked to learn that it would be so much longer.

My introduction was not 10 minutes. It was short and it was awkward. The Honey Badger was waiting for me on the red carpet, and I greeted him way too enthusiastically, nothing like the sweet, demure character I’d rehearsed. I decided to open with one of his own one-liners telling him I was ‘as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs’.

He laughed with me kindly, clearly sensing my nerves. I searched for what to say next, thinking back to my script. The shirt. I encouraged him to take his jacket off. It was weird. I could tell he wasn’t that into it, so I didn’t push it any further. After a total of two and a half minutes, I wrapped it up with a ‘See you inside!’ and almost sprinted up a pebbled path towards a waiting production assistant.

They motioned me towards a waiting camera and boom mic. It was my first voxxie: a short, in-the-moment inter-view, intended to capture how I felt about our interaction. I think I knew from that very first conversation that there wasn’t a spark between us but I didn’t want it to be true. I was resolute that I could shift reality.

A producer called Dean opened the voxxie enthusiastically. ‘What do you think?!’‘He was amazing,’ I gushed. ‘So warm and so lovely. I think we really clicked.’I said everything that I wanted to be true. I needed to position myself as a contender, someone who could be standing with Nick at the end. I hoped Dean would believe it.

After a couple more questions, he let me loose into a courtyard decked out with thousands of fairy lights; at least a dozen other women were already there. We were all left to get to know each other for a couple of hours while the crew wrapped up the rest of the arrivals. It mostly felt like a really good party. Nothing felt real until the longstanding host of the franchise, Osher Günsberg, entered, tapping a champagne flute with his wedding band.

The 28 women clustered around an assortment of velvet couches as Osher welcomed our Bachelor. Nick gave a short speech about the type of love he was looking for, before flirting with the group of women closest to him. I could see the particular women he was noticing, taking in their physicality. I immediately felt insecure.

That first cocktail party was shot over two nights and our first rose ceremony rounded off the second. We lined up across a small staircase within a small room decorated in the most gauche, maximalist style you can imagine. We were instructed to stand in three rows and find a gap between the two women in front of us so our faces could be seen by five cameras.

On TV it takes 15 minutes, but in reality, the exercise went on for hours. The Bachelor was directed to pause as he picked up each rose. To move his fingers up to the petals, look down at the rose thoughtfully and then back up to the girls. Then a name would be read to him over his earpiece. It was an agreed-upon list, constructed after consultation with the producers.

Nick called the name Brittany first, then Dasha, then Kayla, then Rhiannon. I was a little further down the order but breathed a sigh of relief at being safe. The names continued until there were no roses left to give.

Filming wrapped at 5am. We practically ripped off the heels that had been torturing us. Eyes nodded closed as audio guys tried to respectfully remove the microphones sticky-taped down our dresses. As dawn broke, we piled into mini-vans to shuttle back to Quest for one last night. I thought about the girls that had left. Popped into black sedans with a producer, to extrapolate on their humiliation. I felt bad for them; the whole thing felt completely dehumanising, but I couldn’t deny a simmering feeling of superiority.

I’d been chosen. I looked around the van. Someone – be it the Bachelor or the producers – had decided it was worthwhile to keep us around, that there was something interesting about us. A shared sense of relief hung in the air as a greasy bag of hash browns was passed from girl to girl. We would officially move into the mansion the next day.

This is an edited extract from The Villain Edit by Alisha Aitken-Radburn (Allen & Unwin, $34.99), available to purchase here.

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