Last month the courts placed a restraining order on Ricardo Navarro, forbidding him from coming within 500 metres of his estranged Russian girlfriend, Svetlana, after he was convicted of violently abusing her.
Navarro persuaded the producers of the show, Diario De Patricia, that they could capture the couple's reconciliation on camera if he was allowed to surprise Svetlana with an engagement ring. She was clearly surprised, but not pleasantly, when he dropped to his knees and blubbed out his tearful profession of undying love.
Before a million viewers, she made it explicitly clear that she would have nothing to do with him ever again.
Four days later, Svetlana was found dying in an elevator in her Alicante apartment complex with her throat slit.
The next day's show featured a brief expression of regret at the murder, which left a young child from a previous relationship without a mother. However, the production company has rejected any responsibility, insisting that no link can be drawn between Navarro's on-screen humiliation and the savage killing.
The Spanish murder closely resembles a 1995 incident in the US, where a reckless escalation in the ratings war between tabloid TV shows culminated in a tragedy waiting to happen. The Jenny Jones Show first aired in 1991 as a conventional talk show, but quickly began showcasing cranks, bullies, feuding neighbours, and other off-the-wall types who might boost the ratings.
When Jonathan Schmitz was lured onto the show in 1995, he was told that the theme of the episode was 'Secret Admirers'. In fact it was tagged 'Same Sex Secret Crushes'. Schmitz seemed to take it well when his best friend, Scott Amedure, confessed before the studio audience that he fancied the pants off Schmitz. Amedure had been plied with 'Dutch Courage' in the Green Room prior to taping.
Three days later Schmitz bought a shotgun, shot Amedure dead, and turned himself into the police, citing his TV humiliation as his motive. The episode was dropped, but it was later aired (on its 'educational' merits) on the Court TV channel.
Unchastened by the tragedy, the producers of Jenny Jones returned to the theme of secret crushes, this time uncloaking secret admirers who happened to be transsexuals. It was only when one network said enough was enough and dropped the show that the producers pledged better behaviour.
Undeterred, Sky TV in Britain recruited six contestants for a dating show called There's Something About Miriam. The something in question was an unladylike appendage. The 21-year-old Mexican model, Miriam, had been born a man. Confronted with this fact on camera, the winner, Tom Rooke, initially accepted his prize of ?10,000 and a holiday with Miriam, before joining his fellow contestants in a lawsuit against the production company for sexual assault, defamation, breach of contract and emotional damage. The contestants extracted undisclosed pay-offs before the final installment could air.
Like The Jenny Jones Show, The Jerry Springer Show first aired in 1991 as a conventional talk show. And like The Jenny Jones Show it quickly plunged downmarket in the chase for ratings, rounding up trailer trash and letting feuding families goad each other into flinging abuse and stools across the studio floor.
Five years ago a woman called Nanny Campbell-Panitz was murdered by her ex-husband after a confrontation on the show involving his girlfriend. The woman's sons filed a lawsuit against Springer for inflaming "a mood that led to murder".
Another show that stirred up a bad mood was Who's Your Daddy? which was pulled by the Fox network in the US in 2005 after the first episode attracted massive hostility and low ratings. The premise of Who's Your Daddy? was that an adult who'd been put up for adoption as a child would be placed in a room with 25 men, one of whom was their biological father. The contestant could pocket $100,000 by correctly picking out their father. If the contestant got it wrong, the man incorrectly chosen would keep the money.
Another reality show which only aired once was I Want Your Baby, And Nothing Else. The brainchild of Endomol, the Dutch company which devised Big Brother, I Want Your Baby was to follow the adventures of unattached women as they sized up potential sperm donors. It provoked uproar in the Netherlands and only the pilot was screened.
If the Dutch have pushed reality TV to new extremes, they have also been to the fore of asking, 'where does it all end?'
Earlier this year there was a global furore in advance of episode one of The Big Donor Show on Dutch TV. The programme invited viewers to text in their votes as to which of three gravely ill contestants should receive a kidney transplant from a dying woman. When showtime finally arrived, The Big Donor Show was unveiled as a thought-provoking hoax.
Another hoax show which provoked less deep thinking was Lapdance Island. Thousands of males applied to participate in this bogus project which promised to strand ten finalists on a desert island with 40 lapdancers.
The latest reality show to run into trouble is Nothing But The Truth, which was devised in the USA but was recently given its test-run in the strife-torn South American state of Colombia.
Contestants were hooked up to a lie-detector machine and asked a series of increasingly intrusive questions. A contestant who could answer 21 questions without a contradiction from the machine could win $50,000.
Hard-up Columbian contestants confessed to everything from drug smuggling to homosexual prostitution before a studio audience packed with unsuspecting family members and loved ones. The show attracted big ratings and even sparked a boom in sales of polygraph machines, with firms testing their employees in an attempt to prevent infiltration by the country's notorious organised crime gangs.
However, Nothing But The Truth was axed last month when contestant Rosa Maria Solano confessed on-air that she'd hired a hit-man to kill her husband. She testified: "The crime couldn't be carried out because the hit-man tipped off my husband and he ran away forever. God save me." Exposed to the threat of legal action for being after-the-fact accessories to crime, the makers pulled the show.
But the world has not seen the last of Nothing But The Truth. Rebranded as Moment Of Truth, it is set to become the next big thing on TV screens across the world in the coming year.
You have been warned.
By Damian Corless
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