TIme to end it

It’s evidently not enough that Ofcom has roundly condemned the participants in the Big Brother racism row (see our June article) and there’s already a further racism accusation raging regarding the new series. And now the same production company responsible for Big Brother, Endemol, has been caught faking another reality show, this time in the Netherlands.

The Big Donor Show was broadcast by Dutch network BNN and claimed to feature a dying woman who was to choose which of three young transplant patients would receive her kidneys.

It was a hoax: the ‘dying’ woman was an actress and was entirely healthy – though the three ‘contestants‘ were real. Endemol’s Netherlands director has claimed that the idea of the show was to raise public awareness about the shortage of donor organs… and of course, we all believe that, don’t we.

No. We don’t. We know full well that the idea was to create controversy and thus ratings. Just as we know that Big Brother deliberately creates an emotional hothouse in which the participants are manipulated, including the use of in-house ‘psychological counsellors’ who allegedly give participants deliberately inflammatory advice, to encourage them to get into arguments, confrontations and other controversial and ratings-grabbing behaviour. And we also know that the best way to use television to raise awareness of the organ transplant crisis would be to produce a hard-hitting documentary - the kind that production companies don’t have the guts to do.

I think it’s time we saw the end of so-called ‘reality’ programming, because the truth is, it’s nothing of the sort. It’s created, staged, the participants manipulated and the whole scenario ultimately faked.

The only trouble is, people still get addicted to the damn shows. Can we please boycott the format and put it out of its misery?