Shirin Kale

So in 2022, another Married at First Sight UK contributor, George Roberts, was arrested on suspicion of controlling incoherent behaviour after multiple ex-partners came forward after seeing him in trailers for the show.

Following a police investigation, no further action was taken against him and his episodes actually still aired.

This comes back to this fundamental concept of the show, which is that you are putting complete strangers together in very close quarters without 24-hour surveillance and supervision from producers.

So even the most well-vetted show in the world, I think, could have issues.

Here with Married at First Sight UK, it appears that there have been issues in the past and these issues have continued.

But what I would say is that I don't think there's any amount of vetting that you can do to make this format safe.

I'm really surprised that it's taken this long for these sort of validations to come out.

And the reason for that, and this is something that I've really thought about a lot since this Panorama documentary aired, is I do not think there is any amount of vetting that you can do to protect women from predators, because we know that there are abusive predators.

men out there in the world.

We know that women are most likely to be sexually assaulted by their partners.

And many of these allegations go unreported.

So I don't know how a producer would be able to filter these men out pre-show.

The thing about maths is that you are putting strangers together in hotel rooms and then leaving them alone there.

It's kind of astonishing when you actually stop and think about it, right?

Bed sharing as a practice is quite common in reality TV and always has been.

So Love Island, they share beds.

Big Brother, they share beds.

Cameras are always on.

The cameras are always on.

And I've spoken to reality TV producers on shows like Georgie Shore.