Reality TV Hopefuls Battle for a Kidney

May 30, 04:23 AM

Current Headlines: By ALLAN HALL

AILING contestants will compete for a dying woman's kidneys in a TV reality show.

The Big Donor Show made by Endemol, the company behind Big Brother is due to appear on Dutch TV on Friday.

A cancer victim aged 37, identified only as Lisa, will give her kidneys to one of three individuals who makes the best case in a short video.

Viewers will vote by text to urge her who to choose after the videos which will detail the contestants' lives and loves have been broadcast.

The three contestants, who are aged between 18 and 40, could wait years for a kidney to come through normal channels. All have degenerative kidney illnesses.

However, the Dutch donor authority said the show was 'a step towards organ trading'.

The broadcast is being met by revulsion across the Netherlands and in neighbouring Germany transplant clinics have criticised the 'macabre element' to the show.

Dutch MP Joop Atsma of the governing Christian Democrats called the Big Donor Show 'degrading, heartless, morally wrong and reprehensible'.

He said revulsion for the programme was growing across Europe.

He will question the ministers of health and media in the Dutch parliament this week and ask them to prevent the BNN network showing the programme.

Mr Atsma said: 'I want to talk to BNN about this issue. BNN is solving one problem, but creates two others.

'Did BNN even consider how the two people will feel who will be rejected as donor recipients?' But BNN boss Laurens Drillich insisted the broadcast would go ahead as planned.

He added: 'Participants have a 33 per cent chance to get a kidney. That is substantially higher than on the waiting list.' BNN, which primarily targets teenagers and young adults, is known for its controversial and provocative shows in the Netherlands, having aired highly-explicit programmes on sex and drugs.

The Dutch public has grown accustomed to the type of shows it prefers to air, and is usually indifferent when the company launches yet another shock programme.

But the Big Donor Show, with a lifeand-death theme reduced to primetime entertainment, has attracted fierce criticism.

BNN was founded by the late Bart de Graaf, a kidney patient since early childhood. De Graaf never received a donor kidney and died five years ago.

BNN claimed that the show wanted to demonstrate that five years after De Graaf's death, there was still an alarming shortage of donor organs in the Netherlands.

The programme's maker Endemol is a Dutch TV production company with subsidiaries and joint ventures in more than 20 countries around the world, including Britain and the United States.

a.hall@dailymail.co.uk

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