THE HAGUE - A do-good TV reality show highlighting the need for more organ donors, or a programme plumbing new depths in bad taste?
Dismissing arguments stirred by "The Big DonorShow", featuring a dying woman deciding who will receive one of her kidneys, public broadcaster BNN was determined to go ahead with the screening on Friday.
While acknowledging the programme's potential for bad taste and insisting the show will be a one-off one-nighter, BNN says the fury triggered by the idea has successfully thrown the question of organ donation on the map world wide.
"BNN is done with talking, it is time for action. In 'The Big DonorShow' a terminally ill woman will choose which one of three kidney patients will get her kidney. That is not gruesome, that is real life," says BNN's website.
"Every year hundreds of people die because there are not enough donors," it adds.
Significantly, the young people's channel, which has built a reputation for controversy, is screening the show on the fifth anniversary of the death of its founder, Bart de Graaff, who had waited years for a kidney transplant.
The notion was the brainchild of Endemol, the Dutch production company behind "Big Brother" and many other reality TV shows spanning the globe.
Its star is Lisa, 37, who has an incurable brain tumour and must decide which of three candidates aged between 18 and 40, selected by the producers, should receive her kidney.
Viewers can join in with advice by SMS text message.
This is not the first time BNN has courted controversy. Previous broadcasts include "Sex, a User's Guide", a series of no-holds-barred education programmes, and "Shoot Up and Swallow", dedicated to sex and drugs.
Last year the network won praise for another hair-raising show, "Over My Dead Body," documenting the lives and deaths of terminally ill young people.
Dutch Health Minister Ab Klink and his colleague responsible for the media, Ronald Plasterk, have both condemned Friday's donor circus as "inappropriate and unethical because of the contest element."
But they said they would not ban the broadcast as "that would be censorship".
Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said Friday he would not be watching the show, and deplored the fact that the Netherlands was attracting such publicity.
"We would do better to have a different profile" internationally, he said after a cabinet meeting.
In an opinion poll carried out by Synovate/Interview-NSS, 61 percent of those questioned said the show was a bad idea, against 25 percent with the opposite view.
But only eight percent said they would "probably" watch it.
BNN said that even before going to air several people had called to offer their kidneys for the two candidates rejected by Lisa, but Dutch health authorities countered that despite the media attention there was no noticeable rise in registered donors.
The Dutch transplant foundation has vowed not to host any kidney graft stemming from the show in one of its nine centres.
The Dutch doctors' federation KNMG also called on its members to boycott the show, saying, "The suffering of people should never be the object of an amusement show."
"It is doctors who bear the responsibility for the success of a transplant and they determine who gets operated on, not the BNN producers. Because of the medical, legal and ethical questions surrounding this case the KNMG thinks the chances of this operation going ahead are extremely slim," the association added.
BNN says a transplant will go through, but would not reveal how or where, other than to pledge no cameras in the operating theatre.
Dutch law allows kidney donors, whose transplants can be carried out while they are still alive, to choose the beneficiary if there is some link between the two people.
06/01/2007 15:50 GMT