Surreal life: villa of secrets

The Villa was a reality TV show, originally produced by Talent TV from 1999, and aired on Sky1 for four series until 2003. Reruns previously aired on Fox Reality until closed.

Executive Produced for Sky by Jamie Robert, the Villa took four men and four women, computer-matched for compatibility, and flew them from the United Kingdom and Ireland to an exotic Spanish villa for a week of fun and activities in and around the Costa Del Sol.

Cameras would follow the players around all week in Big Brother style, to see if the computer matched the right couples or if it was dead wrong.

Voiced by Mark Little, the show featured student age participants, so involved a lot of snogging, fumbling, drinking and Brits behaving badly.

The "players" were typically easy on the eye, and spent the week teasing each other but rarely actually hooking up for the cameras.

At the end of the week, the computer's matches are revealed to see if the couples paired off the way it predicted.