DUBAI, 2 March 2004 — The first Arab reality TV show ended yesterday after three months of controversy over its format — parading women before suitors in a luxury apartment for 24 hours a day.
The Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC) suspended the show Al-Hawa Sawa (On Air Together), an Arab version of the hit reality TV show Big Brother. The show caused a public outcry in Bahrain where it was being filmed.
“A decision to suspend the program was taken today,” said an MBC spokesman, requesting anonymity and citing a statement by the satellite station that will be published later.
“We don’t want to be the cause of differences of opinion, so MBC decided to suspend production of the program Big Brother from the kingdom of Bahrain, in order to evaluate it so that it is compatible with the channel’s policy,” adds the statement.
The announcement came three days after some 1,000 people, mainly Islamists, protested against the show, which MBC was producing at a villa in a resort called Amwaj on Muharraq island, the second largest in the Bahrain archipelago.
Critics damned the ground-breaking show as too liberal, but fans writing on Internet diary sites said it supported traditional values of limited contact before marriage.
Suitors could view the girls 24 hours a day and contact them before a possible meeting in the flat to propose marriage. In a region of 280 million Arabic speakers, such shows have huge potential audiences and provoke much public debate.
Traditional values in Arab societies require the segregation of men and women, but television networks have increasingly been pushing back the boundaries.
Viewers of Al-Hawa Sawa suspected in January that three of the eight girls from around the Arab world taking part in the show were secretly smoking, flouting a ban on cigarettes and alcohol in the luxury Beirut apartment they moved into in December.
The show ended early yesterday morning when one of the last two contestants dropped a bombshell on-air, saying she refused to get married. She then locked herself in a bedroom until she was flown back to her native Algeria.
“Believe me, I do not want to get married. Please, please — I’m not feeling right. They will know the reason in the media when I get out — I’m going to talk,” emotional 21-year-old Aicha Gerbas told the camera minutes before the finale.
Gerbas had earlier agreed to marry Hossam, an Egyptian who was sitting in the living-room next door to the “truth room” where Gerbas shocked viewers with her sudden change of heart.
