Australian Survivor Is Coming Back! You Can Now Apply To Humiliate Yourself On National TV

Are you a grade-A masochist who loves the idea of being starved and ridiculed on national TV? Do you occasionally find yourself craving the company of sociopaths? Are you still desperately hoping that bandanas will come back in fashion? Are you literally never anywhere to make friends?

You, my wholly unlikeable friend, are in luck. Channel Ten has just announced it’s commissioning its own local version of Survivor and applications are now open.

This news was announced last night as Ten unveiled their full program for 2016. Drawing from the huge success of the network’s other adapted international reality series The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, and I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! (yup, that last one did surprisingly well), the show will launch sometime in the new year and will be staged on a remote tropical island somewhere outside Australia.

“Survivor pioneered the mainstream reality television genre almost 20 years ago and there is still no other show like it,” said Network Ten Chief Programming Officer, Beverley McGarvey in an accompanying press release. “We have wanted to create Australian Survivor for many years, so we are delighted and honoured to be able to bring this amazing show to viewers.”

However this is all something that’s been done before. The show was first adapted for Australian screens by Channel Nine in 2002 and only lasted one season. Here, 16 of the most adorably ocker people in the country were bundled up in what was presumably a leftover prop from a Mad Max film, carted to the edge of the Great Australian Bight and forced to fend off bull ants for 39 days.

Though this was quickly axed due to terrible ratings, Channel Nine eventually had another crack with Celebrity Survivor in 2006. Here, Dicko marooned 12 supposedly famous people and on an island in Vanuatu and watched in morbid glee as ostensibly decent humans who were once on Home and Away were forced to interact with the co-founder of the One Nation party. Sadly, he was the only one doing so and this was also canned after one season.

Channel Ten don’t seem too worried about these failures and are betting higher production values may be the key to success. After all, Survivor has expanded to more than 50 different countries and the US version is still wildly popular despite being in its 31st season. The exact same plotlines have been playing out since I was nine, but last night I very happily watched some guy foraging for necklaces in the Cambodian jungle and eating snails. The show’s beleaguered host Jeff Probst is now 51 years old. This thing will never die.

If this sounds like something you’d like to be a part of, applications are open from now until February 10. To be eligible you have to be an Australian citizen or permanent resident who’s 18 or over, and you’ll need to be able to swim (for fairly obvious reasons). You’ll also need to “engage with others”, be happy living with strangers, and be “physically and mentally strong enough to survive in some of the toughest conditions ever experienced”.

Despite what that last bit implies, it hasn’t yet been confirmed if producers are considering Nauru as one of the potential locations.

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Australian Survivor will premiere some time in 2016. You can apply for a spot here (but, fair warning: the process takes 2-3 hours).