Temptation Island Australia: The shows most salacious secrets revealed
For one season in 2002 the reality show Temptation Is land captivated Australia, full of salacious scandal well before The Bachelor or Love Island.
The show saw four couples — Nick and Cassie, Warren and Alana, Piaf and Clinton, and Kynan and Liana — sent to a remote Fijian island with their relationships tempted by a bunch of glamorous female and male singles.
One of the singles happened to be Kyly Clarke, the wife of Michael Clarke, who was then known as Kyly Boldy.
Hosted by Peter Colquhoun, the show was a hit for Channel 7 but despite this, it wasn’t renewed for another season.
It is only this year that Seven have decided to give Temptation Island another crack, with a casting call out for couples to be part of the new reboot.
What can couples expect?
They can probably expect their relationship to not last, as none of the four couples in the original show are still together.
For the first time news.com.au can reveal some of the secrets and scandals from that first series, which after Big Brother, was the second Australian reality TV series to air in history.
RELATED: Demtel: Tim Shaw reflects on tiny sum he was paid for infomercials
RELATED: The Today Show: Karl Stefanovic ‘wasn’t very friendly’
RELATED: The Bachelor: Alex Nation, Cass Wood on BTS drama
RELATIONSHIP IMPLODES ON FLIGHT HOME
Warren Henningson remembers it like yesterday — his relationship imploding on the plane trip back from Fiji before Temptation Island had even aired.
He had been put through the wringer on the show, after his girlfriend of four and half years, Alana Nott, was tempted by one of the singles on the show.
“I broke up with her on the way home, once the truth came out,” he recalls.
“I got up from business class and walked my way down to economy to where the last of the singles were and hung out with them for the rest of the trip home.”
Going into the show Mr Henningson had high hopes that his girlfriend would remain faithful.
“I never saw it as a test on the relationship, because I figured if you’re with a partner that you love, and they love you, there’s kind of a mutual agreement in place that it doesn’t matter where you are, it could be work, it could be at the shopping centre, you shouldn’t get tempted,” he said.
“Clearly I was wrong, but I kind of worked from a theory that there’s no secrets.”
Mr Henningson, 50, has nothing to do with Ms Nott now and is happily married to his wife Nathalia.
They married 14 years ago. The pair have two children, Claudine, 13, and Gabriel, 14.
They met at Melbourne celebrity hot spot Boutique, where Mr Henningson was working in security and his future wife was working on the door.
At the time — because of what happened on Temptation Island — Mr Henningson wasn’t looking for a relationship, but it all happened quickly and the couple never looked back.
“I’d given up on women,” he said.
“I thought women sucked and she thought men sucked. But we dated for a month and then a month after she moved in and a month after that we were pregnant with our first child and another month after that we got engaged.”
Looking back Mr Henningson doesn’t regret his experience on Temptation Island, despite having his heart broken at the time.
However, the only regret he has was that his time on reality TV was before social media.
“I won’t say it is jealously or envy, but you do look at people coming off reality TV now and they’ve got a couple of hundred thousand followers on Instagram and making themselves a thousand dollars a post, and you think, why couldn’t have social media kicked of years earlier?” he said.
‘THEY CLOSED THE ISLAND DOWN’
Nick Russian and his then girlfriend Cassie Lane went to Melbourne’s Heat nightclub at the very last minute for the casting of Temptation Island.
Both successful Melbourne models at the time, they stood out immediately, Mr Russian recalls.
“I remember when we got there, there was a massive line and the casting people came up to us and grabbed us and walked us straight through,” he said.
Before the era of social media and reality television, Mr Russian was forward thinking — he knew why he wanted to be on the show and that was to build his brand.
“I looked at it as a potential way of giving yourself a platform to be seen and open some further doors, that was my main reason for wanting to go on the show,” he told news.com.au.
“In hindsight it did help quite a bit. I met a lot of people through it and at the time as well.
“I was modelling as well as running nightclubs. I found that after doing the show, it did help me significantly with both.
“For me I was always looking at it in terms of a business angle, even from a very young age.”
Mr Russian was 22 at the time, and now 40, he has developed a career as one of Melbourne’s most premier nightclub owners, running the famous Eve nightclub for many years with his brother Daniel.
However, filming the show itself wasn’t that great.
Soon after arriving in Fiji, Mr Russian was the first to get sick, sending the production of Temptation Island into chaos.
“The first few days were fun and then day three the entire island got sick,” he said.
“I’m not sure if it was food poisoning or gastro, or both.
“I was the first one to get sick. To be honest with you, from that point onwards I was desperate to get home.”
Mr Russian said initially producers thought he’d just had one too many drinks the night before, but as the rest of the cast dropped like flies, disaster had struck.
“One by one everyone got crook,” he said.
“They basically closed our island down for a few days and stopped filming.”
Reality television was a new beast back in 2002 and Mr Russian said producers had no qualms about giving the cast copious amounts of alcohol.
“They literally said ‘now here’s as much alcohol as you can consume, all the best to you’, with the couples and the singles,” he said.
“People forgot how they should be behaving and they forgot that the cameras were on.”
In the end he and Ms Lane didn’t last the distance, breaking up not long after the show finished filming, however Mr Russian still has fond memories of the show.
Mr Russian has been married to his wife Rozalia since 2012 and the couple have two young children.
For Ms Lane she looks back at the whole experiment as just something fun to do, and she only stays in touch with two of the other women on the show — Ms Nott and Liana Cook.
From a pop culture perspective, she is glad to be part of one of the first ever reality TV shows in Australia.
“Not only did reality TV not really exist, there was no social media, it was a different world,” she said.
Ms Lane was young and carefree and she looks back at the experience fondly.
“We got a free trip to Fiji and we got to drink every day and I got along with everyone,” she said.
“So, for me it was just like this awesome holiday. It was a bit stressful at times with the cameras and everything, but I had a different experience to maybe some of the others because I didn’t really get up to much mischief.”
The thing that did change for Lane, who is now a published author, was she became famous instantly in Melbourne and that took a while to get used to.
“I was living overseas in Milan and then I came back to Melbourne and everyone thought I was friends with their sister, or I’d gone to school with them.
“Honestly that went on for 10 years.”
Channel 7 are now casting for the new Temptation Island, and it is expected to air next year on the network.
Luke Dennehy is a freelance entertainment journalist. Continue the conversation via @LukeDennehy
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7r7HWrGWcp51jrrZ7xKernqqklravucSnq2ispmSzra3SoZmam5tkr6a0yKebZqyYmnq0r8SnnKxlo5iur7DApWSopl2WwrTA0ZqjopmeYsOmvtKipqdln5t6tbHMqauarJmku2610qWYp5xfo7K4v4ysq6iqqWSxca7EaphrapJthKOxmHGbbGmTaIB0gpVymZppaWevpA%3D%3D