Sunday,
April 08, 2007
Mammas Pick Sons' Brides on Italian Reality
TV
The
ANNOTICO Report
This
show could probably ONLY work in
But
the Mothers seem to have very sensible criteria in mind. Not one mentioned ”Big Boobs" :) :)
Thanks
to Pat Gabriel
Mammas Pick
Sons' Brides on Italian TV
Sunday
Apr 8 , 2007
Often seen as
mummy's boys, Italian men are now letting their mothers choose their future
wives live on television.
Critics said
Perfect Bride was both insulting to women and showed Italian TV - already
packed with other reality formats such as Big Brother and Celebrity Island -
falling to new depths of banality.
In the first
episode, the jury of mothers - called only by their first names such as Mamma
Rosa and Mamma Ambra - quizzed 18 hopefuls about
their suitability as wives.
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From next week
the mothers will have to live in a Big Brother-style house with their potential
daughters-in-law, seeing first hand how they deal with household chores.
Viewers will be encouraged to vote off the candidates they dislike.
Mamma Teresa said
she was looking for "a simple, intelligent, classy girl" for her son
Claudio. "I would like someone who's not too ostentatious and who knows
how to take care of the family," she said on the program's website.
Claudio, viewers
learn, is "a really capable person, very affectionate with his
family", but suffers from one defect common to many Italian bachelors:
"He has too many girlfriends! I want to find him his ultimate woman."
In
a country where it is normal for unmarried men to live with their parents into
their 30s and "mamma mia!" (my
mummy) is a common exclamation, the Italian mother figure is revered by society
but often feared by girlfriends and wives.
TV critics said
the program exploited the stereotype of the over-bearing mamma.
"It's the
most grandiose, caricatural, corrosive demolition of
the image of the Italian mamma," said
The show's debut
comes as RAI is debating the future of reality shows which the state
broadcaster's chairman, Claudio Petruccioli, said
were "unrealistic and coercive, leading inevitably to unreasonable if not
degrading behaviour".
Petruccioli failed in his bid to
scrap the formats which have become a staple both for RAI and Mediaset, the broadcaster owned by former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.
La Repubblica daily said Prefect Bride had an out-dated vision
of women's role in society. "State TV is going too far in its failure to
limit the rubbish, the rudeness, the lying, the lack of manners and the wiping
out of social changes which happened 50 years ago," it said.
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ANNOTICO Reports Can be Viewed and are Fully Archived
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Annotico
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