Bachelor in Paradise Australia: Tara Pavlovic crowd favourite among hopefuls
Bachelor in Paradise fan favourite Tara Pavlovic dishes the dirt on life, and love, on the island for the upcoming raunchy television series.
Confidential
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AUSTRALIA is in love with love. We’re swept off our feet by reality TV romance, with millions of Aussies sitting down each week to consume hours of amorous viewing.
And from this weekend, Cupid’s bow will fire yet another arrow into our living rooms with the launch of Bachelor in Paradise Australia — a series that promises to be raunchier and more daring than any dating show before.
Following in the footsteps of the US version, Bachelor in Paradise takes reality TV stars from past seasons of the Bachelor and The Bachelorette and places them in tropical paradise — Fiji in this instance — hoping that love, and drama, will blossom.
Gold Coast nanny Tara Pavlovic joins the cast of almost 20 other lovesick hopefuls, after establishing herself as a crowd favourite on last year’s season of The Bachelor, with Matthew ‘Matty J’ Johnson.
Pavlovic will be joined by other past season standouts — including handsome magician Apollo Jackson, who had viewers swooning in Sophie Monk’s Bachelorette.
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And “stage-five clinger” Jarrod Woodgate will also return, after he was last seen walking down the beach sobbing to himself after Monk’s rejection.
Other notable contestants include serial reality TV stars, Laurina Fleure, the outspoken Keira Maguire, and last year’s villain Leah Costa.
For Pavlovic — who won over Australia with her down-to-earth goofy nature — the only downside to a dating show full of reality TV stars is the lack of ordinary Aussie blokes in “high-vis”.
“The kind of guy that I go for is in his high-vis at Woolies, picking up a meal you can just heat up because he doesn’t know how to cook,” she tells BW Magazine.
And though there’ll be plenty of chiselled torsos, with Bachelorette heart-throbs Blake Coleman and Luke McLeod also due to appear, it’ll take more than a sixpack to catch the knockabout nanny’s eye.
“I think it’s a weakness when a guy is too worried about their abs,” she says.
“If you’re worried to the point where you have to watch what you eat when you’re socialising and you’re only drinking vodka-lime-sodas at the pub, I just feel like it’s a sign someone is trying to mask something that’s weak in their personality.”
Since The Bachelor launched on Australian screens in 2013, with handsome chiropractor Tim Robards and his now-fiance Anna Heinrich, a new era of television was born.
No longer were viewers content with the previously dominant cooking and renovation shows. With The Bachelor, they got a taste of tearstained romance, and they wanted more.
As The Bachelor continued, creating stars such as Sam Wood, Richie Strahan, and Blake Garvey, Australians couldn’t help but tune in, with each year since 2014 pulling a season average of close to a million viewers.
The Bachelor gave the once-ailing Ten a new lease on life and they expanded the successful format to include The Bachelorette.
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Last year, thanks to clever casting of celebrity Bachelorette Sophie Monk, the show delivered the network its biggest audience in more than a year with her finale episode pulling 2.2 million viewers, nationally.
No doubt a result Ten hopes to replicate this year with the casting of former Wallabies star of Nick ‘Honey Badger’ Cummins as the Bachelor.
Rival networks were quick to recognise Australia’s devotion to love TV, and Seven and Nine jumped on the bandwagon.
This week, Nine concluded its fifth season of ratings juggernaut Married At First Sight — a show that unites complete strangers in faux marriage. It averaged 1.8 million viewers an episode, making it the show’s highest rating season to date.
The show’s programming rival on Seven, My Kitchen Rules, a longtime ratings star, has continued to pull solid numbers but suffered a dramatic drop in viewers, hitting the lowest in series’ history.
If there was ever an indication, food programming had come off the boil in favour of saucy romance, this is it.
Seeking to capture the Zeitgeist, Nine is also set to launch a local version of UK show Love Island, which takes singles to a tropical destination in the search of romance.
Seven now has a slew of new reality dating shows up its sleeve, including The First Wives Club, in which divorced women try their hand at love, and an original format Back with the Ex, which reunites four singles with an ex they’ve been unable to forget.
But with so much rose-petal adorned content glowing from our screens, how will Bachelor in Paradise tempt viewers to stay tuned?
Pavlovic says it’s the show’s comparative realness and ability to create an authentic environment for romance to blossom that makes it a standout.
“With Matty we were separated from him a lot but with this show it was so much more natural and there were less rules, like a Big Brother vibe.
“There were cameras there but it wasn’t controlled in any way, so we just run amok! And people could have definitely had sex,” Pavlovic teases.
The drama culminates in rose ceremonies, in which the power shifts between the male and female contestants, with each taking their turn to hand out the roses to their chosen heart-throb. Those who fail to receive a rose are eliminated
Fans are already theorising Pavlovic may have struck up a romance with Davey Lloyd after she tagged Lloyd in a cryptic Instagram post of a kettle with a banana emoji along with the caption “Miss you”.
However, she wouldn’t be drawn on the meaning behind the bizarre post or on whether she indulged in any island lovin’.
She did admit things got heated … just not in the way she might have liked. “My back was so sweaty, I was disgusting. When the guys were coming in (to meet everyone) I was like: there’s no way I’m going to pick up anyone.
“I was just dripping, I had to get a special fan from the bartender,” Pavlovic admits with characteristic candour.
After being rejected on national TV on The Bachelor, she wasn’t on the hunt for love.
But, like the millions of romance-obsessed Australians, she couldn’t give up on the idea of it altogether.
So, she’s taking one last televised stab at finding love — that driving force that sends us temporarily crazy for another — and no doubt, the nation will be watching.
Bachelor in Paradise airs at 7.30pm, Sunday on TEN.