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Osher Günsberg opens up about the future of The Bachelor franchise
In 2021, The Bachelorette made history when Brooke Blurton was cast as the first Indigenous and bisexual star of the show alongside both male and female contestants.
Chatting exclusively with Yahoo Lifestyle, host Osher Günsberg has now opened up about the future of the reality TV franchise and where he’d like to see it go next.
The 47-year-old says he is “so grateful” to be a part of a show that reflects current-day society, adding that he couldn’t be more proud of the most recent season of The Bachelorette.
“To show an Indigenous, bisexual woman who is searching to be loved in the way that is meaningful to her and meeting other men and women who are also searching to be loved in a way that is meaningful to them, that is a reflection of interactions and relationships that happen in our community every day,” he says.
“It was easily the greatest season of the show we’ve ever made.”
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Osher went on to say that the show’s producers wanted to do “a non-heteronormative Bachelorette” for five years before it finally happened.
“There are so many cogs that need to align. You have to find the right hero, you have to make sure that the network wants it, you have to wait until all the things fit together and then you can go,” he adds.
'You can't be what you can't see'
As for what Osher hopes to see in the next season of the Channel Ten show, he believes it’s important for “modern dating” to be reflected on-screen because “you can't be what you can't see”.
“There are so many challenges to dating now that didn't exist five years ago, and there were so many challenges that didn't exist five years ago before that,” he says.
“As far as using your phone, pressure to have a video call, pressure to send a picture or use pictures or the visual medium or meeting for the first time using text versus actually speaking to each other and hearing someone’s tone of voice.
“This is how people meet and interact before they see each other now, so having modern dating reflected on-screen in some way that can work in primetime TV, I think would be brilliant. For me, I think that’s what I’d really like to see.”
'That sent chills through my body'
Outside of his TV hosting duties, Osher is a brand partner for Connect Hearing to encourage Australians to take control of their hearing health with the Speech Perception Test.
He says that he first started noticing problems with his own hearing when he was a teenager and there was a consistent ringing in his ears, which is a sign of nerve damage called tinnitus.
“It used to go away when I was 14 or 15 and I was playing in bands and stuff, but from the age of 17 it stopped going away and it's been the loudest noise I can hear in a room pretty much since then,” he explains.
The former Australian Idol host’s hearing was greatly affected when he worked as a roadie in nightclubs at the age of 17 and attended countless loud gigs while at Channel V.
“The price of not looking after my hearing was that I would mishear people’s names and I started to hear the letter S as the letter F very early, I think it was about 31 when that happened,” he continues.
“I was 35 when I got my hearing checked properly and the audiologist looked at my results and said, ‘Mate, if I didn't know that you've worked in the music industry for the last 15 years, I'd say you were a 60-year-old boilermaker who never wore the hearing protection’.
“That sent chills through my body, but I didn't get hearing aids even though I needed them at the time. I just kept putting it off and it waited seven years from that moment.”
'It just blows my mind'
The ultimate turning point for Osher was when his hearing started to affect his relationships with others, especially his wife and stepdaughter who ended up feeling like they weren’t being listened to.
“I stopped going out to loud venues and things like that because I couldn't talk to people and that really did affect me quite a lot and affected my friendships and my quality of life because I started to isolate, but I didn't understand why,” he details.
“But now that I’ve got these hearing aids, the level of technology that they're able to do is incredible when it comes to sound processing in noisy environments. It just blows my mind what happens in these tiny little devices that sit behind my ear.”
You can take Connect Hearing’s Speech Perception Test here and learn more about Connect Hearing here.
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