It's not all death, deprivation and horror in Iraq! The BBC informs us that a new reality TV show is giving Iraqis a vicarious look at...uh...their own devastated society.
A home makeover-style TV programme in Iraq that offers needy families the opportunity to have their war-damaged homes re-built from scratch has become a massive hit.
Or at least, a massive hit among those people who have TVs, and electricity, and working eyes and ears.
I should add that the show itself seems laudable. My quarrel is with the smarmy tone of the BBC article, which blithely compares this humanitarian effort to the West's home-redecorating shows, in order to give it a consumerist context that it absolutely lacks. If the show truly is a "massive hit," it might conceivably be because it offers hundreds of thousands of Iraqis some glimmer of hope for reconstruction, which we've so far denied them.
1 comment:
This reality show is a testament to the surreality of this war. Crazy.
(BBC got scooped on this one bigtime, though. The Guardian had it back in July, and I blogged on it July 31. They use the same framework, likening it to those other construction shows. Urgh.)
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