Big Lobotomy

Nurse, pass me the endemol. Some bastard cut my cocaine with saniflush!

Endemol NV, the Dutch company responsible for unleashing Big Brother upon the earth, have outdone themselves in the tastelessness stakes by producing a new show, Big Donor, in which terminally ill contestants compete for a kidney transplant.

The recipient of the transplant is decided by the television viewers who vote by SMS.

On the surface, this may seem “shocking” as some critics have dubbed it, but considering the sub-moronic contestants on Australia’s Big Brother, and the producer’s struggle to inject even more tension, excitement and controversy into a show that relies very heavily on a dull scenario, stunts like this are The Way of the Future! Only wowsers and pinkos would suggest otherwise.

Having Gretel Killeen host the thing shows that audiences can cope with the unpleasant aftermath of botched surgery, so why not go even further?

How much more exciting would Big Brother be if the contestants had to compete for each other’s organs? Although brains seem to be in short supply, there is a surplus of spleens, colons and gall bladders. Why not have the losers of the challenges wake up in a bathtub full of ice! Imagine how many more viewers the show would attract if half the contestants were attached to drips, or shuffling about, Randall P. McMurphy-style, with tell-tale scars on each side of their foreheads. Well, with that one, there’d be hardly any difference. But watching post-op bogans competing for insulin or an hour on the dialysis machine, would no doubt jack the show up to new levels of nail-biting suspense. Who gets the colostomy bag today? Hear the audience go, Ooooh. Witness the terror and weeping as the housemates get the call: “ This is Big Brother. Emma, please report to the surgery.” Emma is dragged, wailing, clutching at the walls by anonymous men in white coats and surgery masks. Perhaps that’s taking the twisted fantasy too far, but it does sound more like the future than a lame attempt at sensory depravation. Now, I don’t have a TV, but I would buy the fucking biggest one on the market if I could watch something like that.

As “reality” TV moves even further away from actual reality, the stakes need to be upped. We’ve become desensitised to the excitement of watching “real” people doing “real” things in a totally manufactured and manipulated environment. The savage and desperate world of emergency surgery and life threatening conditions may be just what Australian audiences need to shock them out of their complacency. After all, nothing is real to most people unless it happens on TV.