The big donor show

The donor is Lisa, a 37-year-old woman in the prime of her life. She has a malignant brain tumour and doesn’t have long to live. In this show, Lisa will decide to which of three young kidney patients, all of whom have been on the transplant waiting list for years, she will donate her kidney. The problem is real, the waiting list is real, and the three kidney patients are real, but the Big Donor Show is not real. BNN and producer Endemol deliberately looked for a controversial way to draw attention to the shortage of donors in the Netherlands. At the end of The Big Donor Show, presenter Patrick Lodiers revealed that ‘Lisa’, the young terminally ill woman, was, in fact, an actress. During the show he also asked viewers to apply for donor forms online and via text messages, and appealed to politicians to solve this problem once and for all.