Sometimes it’s just nice to let your brain morph in to a warm, gooey pile of mush as you sit back on a weeknight and indulge in a ridiculously over-edited reality TV show.

But whether your poison isThe Bachelor, The Block, Big BrotherorMasterchef, no matter how hard you try to pretend you don’t actually care about what happens in the end, you find yourself more and more invested in the telecast lives of the strangers on your screen.

We are invested via GIPHY

One thing’s for certain: anyone who’s ever fallen in to a reality TV rabbit hole has pondered where these people actually come from and how they were selected.

While we imagine those who actually appear on these shows have to sign all manner of privacy agreements to stop them from speaking out about what really happens on set, leaving us to purely speculate, we spoke to four reality TV star wannabes who auditioned for various programs, and caught a glimpse into how the Vanessa Sunshines of our nightly watching are actually selected.

On behalf of Australia: Thank you, Channel 10, for giving us Vanessa Sunshine.

We've changed their names for privacy purposes, but here's what they had to share:

Trish*,Beauty and the Geek2014

"If I can start by saying, I have zero clue why I wanted to go on this at the time, but I did.

I turned up at the interview at the Novotel hotel in Ultimo, walked in got my name tag from the register desk and sat down in a room with around 30 girls. (This interview you have to be selected to come in for).

Then I went into a room with girls that all looked like clones of each other. The conversation was about fake boobs and nails and hair extensions... I wondered whether this was their way of amping up for the interviews or if this is what they were really like.

I 100% had to play this one up. I wore a pink bodycon dress, threw up some long ass extensions in my hair and had more fake tan on my body than Priceline has in their entire store. I carried around a toy rabbit with me and that was my point of difference.

I pranced around with a toy rabbit in a bodycon dress (someone should’ve slapped me in the face seriously) and I was ready to go.

First interview is with 10 girls, they ask you to step out of your place and into the middle and stand on the tape on the ground. There are at least eight cameras on you and they ask you to ‘tell us about yourself’ .. It’s pretty intimidating; nine other girls, eight cameras, five producers.

After this, they took about half of us into a waiting room.

Then one by one, we each got taken into a private room with one camera and one producer.

They did some photos, asked us some questions and just wanted to see what we were like on camera. This was pretty intimidating and it was kind of harder to fake being dumb when there's some giant light on you the entire time which is super distracting.

I didn’t make it past that round, my rabbit kept falling off my lap and I think they saw I was a massive phoney… I didn’t really adore the rabbit they way I said I had."

Toby*,Big Brother2013

Toby attended the open audition for the 2013 season ofBig Brotherin Adelaide, and said it was basically a zoo full of massive personalities. He said he had to wait "ages" to be called then "blew it", but only three people out of his group of 20 actually made it through to the next round.

"It was a super eclectic bunch of people all trying super hard to be funny, it’s infectious and everyone starts trying to out-do each other."

"One chick didn’t get in and her dad was waiting out the front and asked how she went and she was crying, so he stormed in and started abusing the producers."