A MAN from Rhyl who was a contestant on a new dating programme on BBC Three has left the show midway through the series.
Josh Cem, 24, was appearing on “I Kissed a Boy”, hosted by Dannii Minogue and, the BBC says, “the UK’s first gay male dating show”.
An optical consultant at Rhyl’s Specsavers store, Josh admitted he never kissed, or been in a relationship with, anyone prior to being on the show.
He decided to leave of his own accord after telling Mikey, who he had been interested in, that he had been “putting up fronts and portraying confidence that isn’t really there”.
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Filmed at a farmhouse in Puglia, southern Italy last September, Josh shared his first kiss with Bobski, a former tennis player from Harlow, Essex, who he was paired up with at the start of the show.
Mikey, from Liverpool, then chose Josh rather than Bobski in the second episode’s “kiss-off”.
It was during the fourth of eight episodes that Josh left the competition for good.
Josh, who grew up in a Mormon family, said: “I had no gay friends beforehand, so I wanted to make new friends and learn things about the community.
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“I used to believe that homosexuality was a sin. I’m now going away with a completely new outlook on the dating world and a much more positive outlook.
“If I could look back and communicate with my younger self, I’d say: ‘You can get there in the end’. I’ve sat here now and done it.”
Earlier this month, Josh told the Journal that he was scouted on social media by the show’s producers, before making his way through an extensive casting process.
In the previous episode, Josh had admitted that he was “way, way out of my comfort zone” and had found the experience “harder than I anticipated”.
He said that he was going through “a lot of firsts” while on the show, having only publicly come out as gay at the start of the programme.
You can watch “I Kissed a Boy” on BBC Three every Sunday and Monday night at 9pm, or on demand BBC iPlayer.
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