One million Britons sign up to extra-marital affair dating website

Adverts for the website have not been shown on British television after concerns that some people could take issue with their content

Ruth Wilson and Dominic West in The Affair (Showtime)

Over one million British people have signed up to a website that helps them arrange extra-marital relationships.

Ashley Madison, which specialising in finding dates for people who are already married, now boasts 1,048,342 UK customers, the Sunday Times reports.

Adverts for the website have not been shown on British television after concerns that some people could take issue with their content, however.

Noel Biderman, chief executive of the service, told the newspaper that British adults were most likely to have an affair than in other comparable countries.

The website's slogan is "Life is short. Have an affair."

“Western cultures, and the UK is one them, are leading the charge on this, more so than in the United States or Latin America,” he said.

In 2013 a freedom of information request revealed that MPs, peers, and their staff in Parliament had clicked on a similar extra-marital dating website called Out of Town Affairs 52,745 times.

The website is one of Britain’s largest dating services; it operates in 45 countries and has a total of 32m members across the globe. Its slogan is "Life is short. Have an affair.®"

The service was founded over a decade ago by Mr Biderman, a former lawyer who hails from Canada.