Reality TeeVee...

I saw 2 rather contrasting reality style programmes last night.

Dancing on Ice and Secret Millionaire. I suppose they're not dictionary definitions of the genre but they a new type of programming that has appeared in the last 10 years or so.

Let's just get Dancing on Ice out of the way. It was kind of background noise but something near the end piqued my interest. They have the obligatory phone in voting system but with this being the final, there was a round of phone voting to lose the first of 3 finalists. When they were down to the 2 finalists, the voting was apparently reset so only new phone votes contributed to the final result. Eh?!?? Is that not just incredibly greedy?

On the other side of the coin was The Secret Millionaire which I've never really seen before. Someone from a very from a very comfortable background was invited to live on an estate (Haringgay(sp?) in London, I think) for 10 days and contribute some of his own money to a worthwhile cause that he found during that time. He had to find out about the area and issues without letting on that he was actully worth a lot of money.

What I found really good about it was that he didn't have any imposed rules about how he should distribute his charity, he didn't have to choose one over another although he could if he wanted. At the start he found it was a very different world to the one he normally inhabited and was a bit dismissive but by the end he'd made some good friends and you could see a significant change in his attitude to the problems of others.

He ended up helping out all 3 of the subjects he came across and not with 'life changing' amounts but useful amounts that would help sustain and improve circumstances for the persons and organisations in question.