Katherine Ryan has spilled all on new ITV2 reality dating show Ready To Mingle.
Katherine hosts the series which follows a single girl in her quest to find the perfect boyfriend.
12 male suitors compete for her affections and the opportunity to share a £50,000 cash prize. However, in a mischievous twist, some of these guys are already in relationships.
Not only do some have partners but those very partners aren’t so far away –in fact they’re watching every move their boyfriends make. Play the game well, come across as convincingly single, and it could be a partnered-up boy scooping the cash prize.
Katherine says: “I think at first glance it seems like a girl’s dream to be in a beautiful luxury house with 12 hot guys but soon you’d realise that it’s quite a demanding challenge because some of them are lying to you, some of them are not.
“You really have to be on your toes. You can’t enjoy the coastline. You have to be invested in the game all the time and really second guessing yourself at what is true love. It’s kind of a dream scenario with some nightmarish twists, potentially.”
The girl at the centre of it all is 24-year-old Sophia Maria from Brighton & Hove.
“I thought Sophia was, first of all, very self assured and beautiful and clever and confident,” says Katherine. “I thought she was really self aware about some of the mistakes she had made with dating in the past and she had wanted to fix those problems and what better way than with this experiment.
“To have 12 different men in front of you and be tasked with using your intuition to figure out who’s being genuine and who is not. I think Sophia put lots of what she’d learnt in the past to good use and really tested these boys the best that she could because she was genuinely looking for love.
“She genuinely wants to move forward with someone who is not going to lie to her, not going to cheat on her; a genuine connection. That’s what I loved. I think Sophia was very vulnerable and I think a lot of people at home will see themselves in Sophia.”
And it wasn’t just Sophia who was playing the game with Katharine also unaware of which guys are single or not.
“I think a few of them fooled me,” she admits. “Certainly in my twenties I would not have been able to decipher who was lying and who wasn’t. It’s a lot harder than you think. Everyone involved with the game found that they were surprised by how tricky it actually was –the boys, their partners and Sophia.
“I think now in my thirties I’ve come to really trust my intuition and trust the chemistry and I think when you know you know. When someone’s lying to you you’re not sure but someone’s telling the truth you are sure. Truth tellers are better than liars.”
Meanwhile sharing what viewers can expect from the upcoming episodes, Katharine continued: “The partnered-up boys had an even greater challenge because they had to try to win Sophia over with their partners watching. You’ve got to play a really tricky game there where it’s sort of a game within a game.
“Is your partner telling you the truth when they say they want you to come on this show and get with Sophia and win the 50k? Or are they actually the one who is going to get upset? When your partner told you you could kiss Sophia in the hot tub did they really mean that?! I think the boys had to navigate several feelings if they were in relationships.
“I think for the single boys it was frustrating for them because some of them had to contend with being called liars when they weren’t lying. They did not like to be called a liar.
“So, in summary, my advice to ALL the boys would be to keep a cool head because emotions run high. You’re dealing with trust, mistrust,relationships, friendships and you don’t really know who is telling you the truth. That can make for a tricky situation so the boys who will perform best are the ones who can keep a cool head in the face of all these challenges.”
Ready To Mingle airs from Monday, 6 September at 9PM on ITV2 and ITV Hub
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