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Mammas pick their sons' brides on Italy reality TV
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By Robin Pomeroy
ROME (Reuters) - Often seen as mommy's boys, Italian
men are now letting their mothers choose their future
wives live on television.
Italy's state TV aired the first episode of a new
reality show this week in which the mothers of five
single men have to pick out prospective brides from a
selection of candidates.
Critics said "Perfect Bride" was both insulting to
women and showed Italian TV -- already packed with
other reality formats such as Big Brother and
Celebrity Island -- falling to new depths of banality.
In the first episode, the jury of mothers -- called
only by their first names such as "Mamma Rosa" and
"Mamma Ambra" -- quizzed 18 hopefuls about their
suitability as wives.
From next week the mothers will have to live in a Big
Brother-style house with their potential
daughters-in-law, seeing first hand how they deal with
household chores. Viewers will be encouraged to vote
off the candidates they dislike.
Mamma Teresa said she was looking for "a simple,
intelligent, classy girl" for her son Claudio. "I
would like someone who's not too ostentatious and who
knows how to take care of the family," she said on the
program's Web site.
Claudio, viewers learn, is "a really capable person,
very affectionate with his family," but suffers from
one defect common to many Italian bachelors: "He has
too many girlfriends! I want to find him his ultimate
woman."
In a country where it is normal for unmarried men to
live with their parents into their 30s and "mamma
mia!" (my mommy) is a common exclamation, the Italian
mother figure is revered by society but often feared
by girlfriends and wives.
TV critics said the program exploited the stereotype
of the overbearing mamma.
"It's the most grandiose, caricatural, corrosive
demolition of the image of the Italian mamma," said
Italy's leading daily Corriere della Sera.
The show's debut comes as RAI is debating the future
of reality shows which the state broadcaster's
chairman, Claudio Petruccioli, said were "unrealistic
and coercive, leading inevitably to unreasonable if
not degrading behavior."
Petruccioli failed in his bid to scrap the formats
which have become a staple both for RAI and Mediaset,
the broadcaster owned by former prime minister Silvio
Berlusconi.
La Repubblica daily said Prefect Bride had an
out-dated vision of women's role in society. "State TV
is going too far in its failure to limit the rubbish,
the rudeness, the lying, the lack of manners and the
wiping out of social changes which happened 50 years
ago," it said.
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