Dutch Kidney Donor TV Contest Was a Hoax

The leading contender for best practical joke of the year has to be the Dutch TV grogram “The Big Donor Show,” which aired on Friday in the Netherlands. The premise was that three people suffering from kidney disease would compete for the kidney of a terminally ill woman who would choose which of the three would get her spare parts. At the moment of truth, the announcer told the viewing audience that the whole thing was a hoax to focus attention on the lack of donors. Brilliant.

It is, perhaps, an indictment of civilization as a whole, and at least of television, that this hoax could even have been attempted. This journal was taken in along with almost everyone else, in large part because of the huge diet of miserable crap that is aired around the clock. While a game show offering organs as prizes to the sick would set a new low, it wouldn’t be appreciably lower than “Fear Factor,” in which part of the contest is eating or drinking something truly awful without vomiting, or “The Apprentice,” in which one has to listen to Donald Trump pontificate about being a successful businessman (why then do his casinos in Atlantic City always lose money?).

However, a good practical joke starts from the premise of believability. Whatever outrageousness is perpetrated only works if it is plausible. There are terminally ill people whose organs could help those who are seriously ill but not fatally so. There is a shortage of organs donated in every country on the planet. TV has fallen from its golden age because there is an increased demand for content (back when even America had only 3 networks, programs aimed higher up the brow). All of these combined made the joke possible.

Presenter Patrick Lodiers said right before the “winner” was to be announced, “We are not giving away a kidney here, that is going too far even for us.” After the show, one of the producers said, “We have only done this cry for help because we want to solve a problem that shouldn't be a problem.” And it seems to have worked to a degree. Dutch Culture Minister Ronald Plasterk called the program a “fantastic stunt.”

Mr. Lodier got it right when he said, it was “reality that was shocking.” In the Netherlands, one of the richest and most civilized of nations, 200 people die each year waiting for a kidney that could save them. The waiting time for an appropriate organ is 4 years. Its neighbors are no better, and in North America, it could be that matters are actually worse. As a practical joke, it was marvelous. As a teaching tool, it may have achieved something enduring. And if one person becomes an organ donor because of it, then, the producers will have done something few in television ever do – they will have saved lives. And this journal is delighted to be laughing at itself.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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