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Terrible Telly
Just when you thought television couldn't get any worse... the Dutch makers of Big Brother plan a reality show featuring a terminally ill woman who has to choose who gets one of her kidneys when she dies.
All this and plans from Britain's Channel Four to broadcast photos of Princess Diana's dying moments, snapped when she was trapped in her crashed car in a Paris underpass.
First up, The Big Donor Show. Sounds like a late April Fool, but it features a 37 year old woman known as "Lisa" who must decide which of the three ill contestants wins her kidneys. BNN, the broadcaster which will be showing the programme, says the show highlights the problems facing kidney patients. It adds that its founder died five years ago of a kidney-related illness.
It's what he would have wanted?
Viewers will be able to text recommendations to Lisa throughout the 80 minute show.
Dutch critics of the show have called it wretched and unethical, but the broadcaster says it will go ahead with the transmission on Friday night.
Endemol, makers of the Donor Show, also produced Big Brother, which hit the headlines last year when celebrity contestants were accused of racist bullying of an Indian actress on the show. Big Brother is broadcast by Channel Four, which was created in the 1980s with a remit to broadcast minority interest and alternative shows.
This week it plans to broadcast a documentary on Princess Diana's death. The documentary will show photographs of the dying Diana for the first time in Britain. Royal sources, predictably, are fiercely opposed to the broadcast of these images, snapped by photographers as the Princess was trapped in the car following the 1997 crash in Paris.
Britain's Conservative Party, too, has called on Channel Four to rethink its plan: "It is difficult to see who will be served from broadcasting such sensational and private material," said arts spokesman Hugo Swire, who said that the broadcaster had "crossed a line."
Channel Four has defended its decision to broadcast the show.
