James Mathison Dishes The Dirt On The Ugly Parts Of ‘Australian Idol’
Reality TV is bad for you.
2017 hasn’t been a great year for ex-Australian Idol contestants. Shannon Noll was arrested outside a strip club. Paulini was done for bribing a public official. Kate DeAraugo is facing 15 years for an assortment of drugs and weapons charges.
Which makes this a very fitting moment for James Mathison — who hosted Idol together with the media personality formerly known as Andrew G — to go on record about his time working on the wildly successful reality show.
In the latest episode of podcast You’ve Gotta Start Somewhere, Mathison has opened up about the “two things” that never really sat well with him when Idol was on the air. The first, he explained, was that winning contestants would “get record deals but the ones that weren’t clearly going to make money were quickly like, ‘See ya, bye.’”
And the second? “I was never really comfortable with those early audition rounds on Australian Idol where kids would come in who didn’t know how terrible they were,” he said.
“Producers knew how terrible they were, put them in front of the judges knowing that they were going to get mocked and ridiculed by the judges and then by people at home.”
He said those contestants weren’t “in on” the joke. “We would have producers who would be like, ‘This kid is going to be television gold!’ But you also knew that the next day after that show aired [they] would be humiliated and ridiculed and their life would be difficult for a little while after that.”
“We knew what the power of being on television was and what the after-effects were — they didn’t.”
The one-time political hopeful also opened up to podcast host Rachel Corbett about the ugly side of overnight fame. “For about two weeks you are like, ‘How shit hot am I?’ and then very quickly you’re like, ‘This is messed up,’” he said.
“I think it’s a bit of a headfuck. All of a sudden everyone knows who you are and I don’t want this to sound like I’m complaining about it because it’s an extraordinary experience, but it’s also something that I’d never encourage anyone to want… it makes you feel like a freak.”
So basically, UnREAL was right: reality TV is evil and really, really bad for you.