The UK version, which has been going for
14 years (there are a lot of "former" roles listed next to the names of those people), is basically an attempt to relaunch a career or are desperately short of money and need some sort of attention/employment.
Speaking of bad reality TV... I've been noticing a fair bit lately on American unscripted TV shows (like COPS, those Tow-truck shows, Judge Judy, etc), a lot of regular citizens are starting to pronounce "ask" and "asked", as "aks" - like, "I aks him where he was". It's like some lazy pronunciation making its way into regular Western vernacular, which will filter into Australia eventually, like everything else in American culture.