A Wonderful Guilty Pleasure: The Villa

A Wonderful Guilty Pleasure: The Villa by Roxanne McDonald

A real blockbuster of guilty pleasures is The Villa, an Australian matchmaking show which is delightfully entertaining on a number of levels.

One could really put all reality TV into the “guilty pleasures” category, for it has little redeeming value (save maybe shows like Survivor or Big Brother, which you could say teach you how to cohabitate and strategize and, well, survive). But a real blockbuster of guilty pleasures is The Villa, an Australian matchmaking show which is delightfully entertaining on a number of levels.

Produced by Target Entertainment and originally airing on Sky One (dubbed the UK’s “most popular non-terrestrial entertainment TV channel”), The Villa was acquired in July of 2005 by Fox Reality with a number of other “unscripted programming” series never before seen in the U.S.—to show American viewers how reality TV is done in other parts of the world.

First, then, is the fascination we have with

accents and brogues, of which there are plenty on The Villa! Mostly Australian, the [eight] participants are flown from England to Spain, to the Mediterranean island, Ibiza, to stay for a week (well, five days, really) in a lovely, spacious, inviting of romance and romping villa. The participants are four men and four women, selected by a computer according to personality, looks, astrological predisposition, likes, dislikes, and infamy. Each potential couple is matched by the computer, unbeknownst to all eight people.The men and women spend the five days partying, disco dancing, dining, shopping, snorkeling, diving, hiking, horseback riding, fair-going, water skiing, and more…. Amidst the activities, which also include one nighttime costume party they enjoy at the villa, the individuals follow their hearts (mostly the women do) and their groins (mostly the men do) to try to make a match—which the production team intends or hopes is the match the computer has made for them.

Since the Australian voice is most prominent, there is a lot of snogging, and just as much discussion of who’s acting like a tosser, who has ginger hair, and who is lovely or just pissing on it, isn’t it?

This is one of the more delightful characteristics of the show, the euphemisms and jargon familiar to the Aussies (which the TV ads for the show play up by giving English versus Aussie translations). Another interesting bit to The Villa is the kinds of language that are allowed to slip through and past the U.S. censors: “shit” and “tits” are nothing but pieces to the conversation, as are other words George Carlin would be impressed make airing on Fox Reality when they don’t make it elsewhere.

(There are, then, very few bleeps, and those few are indicated not by a blooper sound, a buzzer, or any obnoxious tone but by a frog croak. Lovely, really.

And what makes the show even more engaging—besides the ample amounts of nudity and drama—is the commentary of the wry, tongue-in-cheek sarcasm of announcer Mark Lyttle. He points out the discrepancies and contradictions, jostles the participants, and mocks the madness. He makes the show as much as do the young women seeking true love and the young men seeking true snog. Ahh, Mother Nature is still tricky, in any part of the world where the biological imperative differs for the sexes, regardless of what language they speak.

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