Confessions of a Set Runner: What Australian Reality Shows Are Like Behind the Screens

How does the reality TV sausage get made? Season Two of 'UnREAL' premieres tomorrow night at 9.30PM on SBS VICELAND and SBS On Demand.

If somebody had told 19-year-old me that by 25 he'd be earning the majority of his income working in reality TV, he'd have turned his nose up and laughed.

Back then I was studying screenwriting, training as an actor and was sure I would change the face of Australian film, theatre, and TV.

Fast forward eight years and I'm two years into the closest thing I've ever had to a meaningful career. After a near mental breakdown, partly born out of working full time in a job I hated, rather than on anything even remotely related to what I'd studied, my brother pitied me and set up an interview with a friend of his who hires runners for reality TV.

Within a month I was out of retail and on a reality set. Which is often somebody's house, or a carefully selected location, rather than a set.

Over the years of creative life I'd collected a strange array of seemingly disparate, not-particularly-valuable skills, but when I began working in TV, I realised that, in this environment, they weren't disparate at all.

In reality, just like in other forms of media, we break stories apart and put them back together. It requires creativity, attention to detail, grit, a sense of humour, and a curiosity about human behaviour. Even though I was working my tits off, it was such a relief to finally feel like I was applying and extending skills that I enjoyed using in a job that could become a career.

I still mostly work as runner, which means changing bins and getting coffee and running errands. It also means that I get to hang out, pick people's brains, and learn everything they're willing to teach me. Which often times is quite a lot.

There are still times that I don't have a contract, like now, because I'm still developing my network. It's hard, sometimes unforgiving work, but I love it.

Here's what I've learnt so far about the world of reality TV.

Not all of the things you see on shows like UnREAL actually happen, but life behind the scenes of a reality show has still been pretty nuts so far.

There's a difference between the moments that we really craft and the stuff that we simply capture happening.

A scene is anything that we've quite obviously had a hand in; things like the host chatting to the contestants, scores being revealed, or my favourite, an elimination. They range from super scripted to a vague brief about what should happen. Everything else is called reality. We just shoot it as it happens.

All shows have a mix of the two, some blend them seamlessly, and we all love when things happen that we'd never have expected.

The deadlines are tight. Like, crazy tight. In drama you might shoot a few scenes a day, in reality you might shoot an entire episode worth of content across two days. Your timelines are firmer as well, if you have a day to shoot a specific thing, you really only get that day.

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There are also a huge amount of uncontrollable variables. Very often you're on location, which means that what you shoot and how you shoot is very dependent on the weather, the light, council filming permits, curious passers by, and a million other things. The talent (the people in front of the camera) are rarely professional performers, so you often have no idea how they'll react, where they'll go, or what they'll do. That's if they decide to do anything interesting that day.

In drama you might have half an hour or more to set up a shot, rehearse, and brief the crew. In reality the stuff very often happens live, and the crew have to figure out a way to catch it without interfering too much.

This means that everybody is running around like mad to get a shot, set up a new shot, prepare for a scene, trying to get the talent to actually do the thing that they signed up to do, packing down from the previous scene, furiously trying to get permission to film something, and on, and on, ad nauseam.

Every little thing seems super important and information is given on a need-to-know basis, often less because of confidentiality and more because of time constraints.

This leads to some hilarious and very stressful miscommunications, like the time I was sent out to find 48 knee pads and went around to all of the hardware stores in Melbourne for two days. I was at 45 when I got the call that, actually, we only needed 12. To this day, none of us know how we came up with 48. The rest are still in storage because the art department refuse to throw things out.

It's funny, but mistakes like this cost money and more importantly time. So you learn pretty quickly that it's better to ask a million dumb questions and get really clear on the brief before you begin working.

The technical skills required to work in reality are really impressive. The camera guys, soundies, producers, and art department are some of the best in the business, and working with them means that you get to soak up that brilliance.

They've got to be good enough to set up a critical shot in two seconds flat, make sure they have enough coverage (enough audio and vision of the right stuff so that the story makes sense on screen), and make sure all of the different people covering what's going down are on the same page—all the while having seven different conversations going on in two different ear pieces, with their phone pinging like crazy, and two other places that they need to be immediately.

And they make it look easy.

Maybe I've been lucky, but these people I get to work with are not just highly skilled, they're really humble and they keep their cool under intense pressure. Some of them used to cover war zones, but they'd never tell you that.

In pop culture there's this perception of reality TV sets as extremely volatile places with constant power struggles. I've found them to be almost the exact opposite.

People just want to get the job done fast and well.

Starting on any new production, especially when you're as green as I was, is incredibly intimidating. I expected it to be like the movies, with divas as far as the eye can see and grizzled creatives smashing ciggies.

Only the ciggies part turned out to be true. These sets are actually the most generous workplaces I've been in.

As a runner, you're halfway between an office temp and a waiter. It's the most junior job on any production and it's famously hard, thankless work. But I was thanked all the time. Not in that condescending HR 101 way, either. People are just genuinely grateful when you make coffee happen, or carry that thing.

You know that scene in UnREAL where Quinn triumphantly declares that they've found their villain for the season? That doesn't happen in Australian reality TV. Or at least, I haven't seen it happen.

To be honest, I was disappointed about this at first. I was expecting all of this mischievous string-pulling and plotting from the producers, but actually their main job is to communicate to the editors what actually happened between cast members, as well as to try to make them open up and be themselves.

Because when you throw a bunch of strangers into a high pressure situation, or even a low pressure situation in front of the cameras, the shit they say or do on their own is usually far more interesting than anything you could come up with.

We'd script it if we could. It would save a ton of money. But we can't, so we don't.

This shit actually happened, that person actually did that awful/awkward/amazing thing to that other person. When you release them from the polite expectations of their regular life, people behave in some really weird and wonderful ways. That's why reality is so addictive to watch.

The worst behaviour doesn't always make it to air, but sometimes it does. And nobody is rubbing their hands together hoping for everyone to do something shitty.

In the end, people like watching people that they like. So, in my experience, we're often working harder to make people look likeable than we are trying to make people into villains.

Because people are a bit fucked, but they're also really great sometimes, and we want to show both.

It's definitely harder to catch them being great.