The Big Sickening Hoax

All for new donors

Well, what can one say? It transpired that The Big Sickening Show (de Grote Donor Show) was a hoax after all, or was it?

The show did take place the only difference the horribly expected and what occurred was that the supposed terminally ill kidney donor was just an actress and the kidney patients were in on the act.

It would appear there was a studio audience of the unshockable who participated in this charade before they learnt that not much of this was reality as pseudo-reality.

Interviews with the producer of the show indicated that 12,000 prospective organ donors had applied for a donor card - the net gain of this event is that they brought a serious issue to public awareness and this is a positive.

Some have already rationalised saying that the non-appearance of the so-called terminally ill donor means no harm was done - in fact, Endemol promised never to cross the limits of acceptable decency by making such a show.

It was a bad kite

It still leaves me unimpressed, hoax or not, there was intent and a possible attempt to completely outrage public decency - they flew a kite (they assessed reaction by being suggestive) and what is to say if there was not such uproar from sections of the public and politicians, that reality would not have been visited upon our screens?

In my book, the end just does not justify the means and in this case, if the intention was to bring more awareness to the organ donor issue, other ways of doing this might have been involved and difficult, but this shock tactic method is beyond the pale and patently unacceptable.

As an almost "vibrant" democracy, the freedom of expression is upheld and protected, but if we give the impression that there are no bounds of decency and sensibility in the exercise of this freedom, what great surprises would we be preparing ourselves for in the near future?

I can assure you, this is not the last we would hear of another edition of The Big Sickening Show genre. But if this is the evolution reality television; to stimulate debate by threatening unethical, reprehensible, atrocious and morally bankrupt human depictions on television, we have arrived a new stage of human de-civilisation and it is as far from nirvana as the East is from the West.

The Big Sickening Show

Big Brother don't bother

When I first saw Big Brother and the rave accompanying it many years ago, I felt we could not plumb any further the depths of depravity, I was wrong.

Big Brother has excelled exceedingly in scraping the dregs of all that is humanly and socially despicable, deplorable and disdainful.

Only last week, Channel 4 in the UK and implicitly the producers of Big Brother - Endemol - which has a Dutch progeny were upbraided for making "serious editorial misjudgements compounded by a serious failure of their compliance process".

This was in relation to the Celebrity Big Brother 2007 show where racist bullying by poorly educated celebrity dunces was aired as they laid into a more sophisticated and successful ethnic minority contestant.

There is no doubt that the producers allowed the rotten behaviour dressed as controversy to continue, they also allowed it to thrive despite the fact that people were losing lives in India because of the events on the show - it was amazingly free publicity and wanton ignominy that could not be paid for or garnered by any other means, they cynically exploited it to the extent that their sponsors cringed and pulled out of the show.

Inspired of mendicancy

Now, the makers of this rotten tat genre have descended into a bottomless pit that digs deeper than the misery of hell, nothing can be as desperate as begging to notoriety far beneath the most unacceptable cause or whim.

The new reality fare has three contestants vying for the healthy kidney of a terminally ill cancer patient. I cannot begin to think of how this format would involve the public in phone-ins and voting - So, nastily named that it translates from Dutch into The Big Donor Show .

The "O" in Show is the shape of a kidney, these people are sick and they make me violently, regurgitatively and retchingly sick beyond respite, they are too obviously certifiable.

Suffice it to say the producers have rationalised this event and stated that this would highlight issues with organ shortage, organ donations and the needy recipients, but this can also be handled in a series of documentaries on the matter. O! Really?

This is NOT Liberal

The Dutch are known for being liberal, but I would be darned if this fits into any definition of liberal and not a less appealing depraved bastardisation of humanity.

Unfortunately, the outrage to this affront to all that is good and decent gives undeserved oxygen and priceless publicity to a programme which might go ahead in the name of free speech, scheduled for this Friday.

It is left to be seen if the contestants will be wheeled on stage on gurneys all laden with intravenous medication from the four posters as the dialysis machines hum with terrifying distraction in the background just as the cancer patient writhing in pain, half-sedated on morphine plays eternal benefactor of a life restoring miracle - a badly needed kidney.

The fallout without responsibility

Then what counselling or consolation would desperate and O so desperate patients receive from the disappointment of losing out and the winner finding out that there is no type match as some unscrupulous doctor is paid to perform the transplant probably for another spin-off show?

If during the show, the terminally ill patient dies, who assumes the Power of Attorney to make the donor choice or would that have been written in a will thus giving the impression of a pre-determined winner?

This opens up too many issues of ethical, moral, social, psychological and legal import, but the quest for publicity and notoriety has probably subsumed this wholesomely important matter.

This all makes for entertainment ever so gross, but the fact is; there is a public who will be entertained and titillated by their quest for material to sate their interminable voyeuristic lusts. No one however, to take responsibility afterwards for psychological and emotional fallout as patient and donor experience how life ends in humans suffering from incurable diseases.

Before long, it would be childless women vying for donor eggs or who handles the pain of labour best before asking for an epidural, maybe some puppy-eyed kids vying for adoptive parents, or imagine the Big Heart Gift - it just does not bear consideration - if this show gets through and gets aired; the human race would have gone too far down the lane of degenerative evolution; apes would probably be more principled in their approach to social issues in their primate communities.

It must be stopped forthwith without any mitigating circumstances whatsoever.

Methinks, this protest is futile.