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BBC's Baby Borrowers: experiment or exploitation?
Take one underfunded channel desperate for more viewers in order to justify its remit, throw in the current trend for reality TV featuring wives/husbands/children/pets/etc. and Baby Borrowers is (perhaps) the thoroughly predictable end result. Indeed the only surprise remaining is why it took broadcasters so long to come up with the idea in the first place.
Or maybe it took them so long because the whole premise behind the series is incredibly cheap, tacky and tawdry even for a channel such as BBC Three, since it effectively creates cheap 'entertainment' out of the lives of babies and children who may be too young to realise exactly why they are being put through what could conceivably turn into an ordeal for them.
Foster parenting may be an age-old tradition but it almost always happens because there is no other choice for the children involved, and the prospective parents are carefully selected from a long list of applicants. Let's hope that the producers of Baby Borrowers have been equally selective with their choice of 'candidates'.
