Virgin Island producer admits they were ‘terrified’ the entire cast would quit the show
'I was obviously terrified that they were going to leave the island straight away'
Virgin Island is certainly one of the shows where you feel in quite a lot of disbelief that it ever even got made, let alone people actually signed up to be part of the cast.
But it seems like the producer of Virgin Island seemed to think the same, as he admitted he was “terrified” that the entire cast of the show would quit within hours of filming having started.
But first off, the commissioning editor Jonah Weston revealed why he decided to greenlight the series in the first place.
He explained: “Many people applied for the show – literally hundreds – which backed up our hunch that we were onto something,” he says.
“Obviously, duty of care is important to us at Channel 4 so it was a question of the brilliant casting team and psychologists getting the right mix of people who felt representative of what is going on in Britain, but also people that the team felt were able to go through this process.
“You can see how courageous those people were to go on that course, let alone do it on TV. It was really important for us that they were fully briefed for exactly what was going to happen and prepared for those emotions that might come up.”
The producer of Virgin Island told The Mirror that a show with this format had never been done before, and he was “terrified” the whole cast was going to quit.
He explained: “I was obviously terrified that they were going to leave the island straight away. It’s a TV first and nobody really knows what’s going to go on.
“Our biggest worry was how are they going to take to the therapy. What we actually got was a little bit of scepticism at first but gradually as the process went on, they fell more in love with the therapy and it ended up being transformational.”
He added: “The other thing is that consent was key – they were also in control and they could take it as far as they wanted to or not. That was paramount.”
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