BAHRAIN: 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.
Critics damned the ground-breaking dating show Al Hawa Sawa (On Air Together) 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. The show ended just as Arab television channel MBC said it was temporarily pulling the plug on its version of the hit reality show Big Brother after charges of "indecency" and protests in the conservative Gulf state of Bahrain where it was produced. Big Brother is to be relaunched from another location.
Big Brother showed six men and six women living in the same villa, flouting traditional values in Arab societies that require the segregation of unmarried men and women.
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 flouting a ban on cigarettes and alcohol in the luxury Beirut apartment they moved into in December.
The show ended early on Monday 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," an emotional 21-year-old Aicha Gerbas told the camera minutes before the finale. - (Reuters)