TV contest to 'win' donor kidney

Called The Big Donor Show, the programme will air this Friday in the Netherlands despite an outcry from politicians who denounced it as "wretched".

The 80-minute show, to be broadcast on the youth network BNN, involves a 37-year-old woman called Lisa who is terminally ill. Three contestants aged between 18 and 40, all with kidney disease, will compete for public votes to secure the organ by making short films about their lives. Viewers can text the dying woman with messages about who should get the kidney.

Laurens Drillich, the president of BNN, said: "Participants have a 33 per cent chance of getting a kidney. That is substantially higher than people on the waiting list." BNN also advances the argument that its founder, Bart de Graaf, was a kidney patient who died five years ago, and the show highlights the shortage of organ donors.

Joop Atsma, a leading Christian Democrat politician, said he hoped the programme - which he branded "degrading, heartless and morally wrong" - might still be pulled.

"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?"

The "star" of The Big Donor Show said she is happy to go ahead despite the fact the transplant authority in the Netherlands criticised the programme as "a step towards organ trading". Kidney charities in the UK were also critical. Sheena Dunsmore, the manager of the Scottish charity Kidney Kids, said she believed the show demeaned the work involved in donation.

"People have to be a complete match, it can't just be any kidney. If you have a child that needs a kidney transplant, you've got to go on a waiting list for the next few years to get a complete match. I don't think a programme like this would go down too well," she said.

The row came as Endemol faces unprecedented pressure over decency in the forthcoming series of Big Brother, which it makes for Channel 4. The first show, to be broadcast tomorrow, will open with an apology to viewers over the treatment of the Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty by other contestants in January's Celebrity Big Brother, after she was the victim of allegedly racist comments.

One media expert said television was being driven downmarket. Chris Horrie, the author of Tabloid Nation, said: "What's really driving this is the internet. You've got Saddam Hussein being hanged, people burnt to death in cars, stuff being caught on mobile phones. The argument that people need to be protected from their own baser instincts doesn't really make any sense any more.

"Television and the web are fusing together and turning into the world's most luscious tabloid. It is like undiluted porn, sport nonsense, football speculation, conspiracy theories, people selling their organs, freak show plus cutesy pets."

Charles Fletcher, an Edinburgh media analyst, said he believed broadcasters were succumbing to a downward spiral in media ethics. "The donor programme is scandalous, the dregs of broadcasting," he said.

In a reference to a forthcoming programme by Channel 4 featuring graphic pictures of the car crash that killed Diana, Princess of Wales, he added: "You just have to look at the debate [over the images], even contemplating running those pictures is a disgrace."

TV SHOWS FLYING CLOSE TO THE EDGE

ULTIMATE FIGHTING CHAMPIONSHIP

: This is slim on rules and instead offers a series of brawls between fighters who use a mix of martial arts skills. It has built a huge following in the past decade and is particularly popular among viewers aged 18 to 34

THE FARM

: Endemol reality show for Channel Five that featured celebrities being abandoned on a farm for three weeks. Viewers complained to Ofcom over one particular scene in which Rebecca Loos stimulated a boar by hand to collect its semen for a vet

BIG BROTHER

: Criticised in 2006 for the dysfunctional nature of the contestants: one seemed to have suicidal tendencies, one was a recovering anorexic and the winner had Tourette's syndrome. A mental health charity called BB a "21st-century freak show"