Zara McDermott left 'scared' and 'petrified' after almost being arrested in Thailand

Zara McDermott has admitted she was left "scared" and "petrified" after she was almost arrested during the making of her latest BBC documentary.

The former Love Island star and TV host travelled to Thailand to look into an exotic paradise but also the darker side of the country. And although she and the BBC crew had gained permission to film the bars of Bangkok police tried to take their footage and threatened them with arrest within hours of Zara arriving.

Asked If it was scary, Zara said: “Definitely. The whole sequence gets cut down. But that was over the span of a few hours of filming there, the tensions were starting to increase with the police.

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“We nearly got arrested because of the filming that we were doing, but, the interesting thing about that is that we'd got all the permissions in advance. We'd been okay to film there.

They were telling us to move, and they didn't want us filming here, and then we'd move, and then they didn't want us filming there. And it was they were making it more and more tricky.

"And the bar owners were definitely, definitely kind of trying to throw their weight around a bit, and wanted us to get out of the area completely. In the end, the bar owners kind of, you know, they won in that sense, and we had to leave.”

In the programme viewers will see Zara and the crew have stopped filming the bars and women trying to get men into the bars, after the pressure from owners and police. One crew member had an ashtray thrown at them. Police then also refuse to let them leave and they are next to the BBC van trying to get them to delete what they have already filmed.

Zara added: “They'd asked us several times through that process to wipe the cards(storing camera footage), and we were going to lose everything that we'd shot over the last day or two. So that was also a really, really scary moment of not only, you know, us potentially being arrested, but us losing what we were there to do.”

As well as highlighting the bar lifestyle and drug use in Thailand, Zara also speaks to several sex workers. Some of the stories they told her were shocking and scary.

Zara said: “I'm often left with more kind of philosophical, social based questions, especially after coming away from the sex industry over there and seeing how prolific it is.

“I heard some quite harrowing stories about women and what they were subjected to at the hands of a paying customer, and that made me completely petrified. Yeah, one of the stories is pretty horrendous, but just an overview is essentially that this woman, she was a sex worker, and essentially a customer had tied her up and then asked her to take a pill, trying to get her to take this pill, and she has no idea what it was.

“I mean, honestly, what a brave woman, she managed to get herself out of the situation and get herself out of the room. But who knows what that pill was that he was trying to get her to take, what could it have been? We won't know. She could have died there easily.

“That kind of thing, I think really does keep you up at night when you think, Gosh, this is happening in the world. And I think going to somewhere like Thailand and seeing that side of the industry, and hearing awful stories like that, you know, I think it's really easy to live a life where ignorance is bliss, but then you actually open your eyes to some of these things that are going on pretty much under your nose and everywhere you turn, and it makes you realise that the world is is a pretty dark place at times.”

Zara not only presents the new documentary series but also developed it from scratch. She told the Mirror: "I think that's really important to me to not just turn up on the day and do the filming and then go home after. All the things I learned from filming, I always take home with me, and I want to kind of implement all my learnings into my next project.

"So yeah, I'm really involved in the development and the edit, and all of the process is important to me, not just the presenting, and I also think the fun parts come from the creation."

* Thailand: The Dark Side of Paradise is on BBC iPlayer from Monday September 8.