Does watching three invalids, dependent on dialysis, competing for a kidney make riveting television, even if it is watch-through-parted-fingers TV? We like to think we are above such things. But then look at the crowds who gather to gawp at a car crash. No TV executive gets rich by producing shows that win awards, but which have an audience even smaller than the number of people who have begged David Gest for the name of his plastic surgeon. But if audience ratings were the sole yardstick, trumping all moral misgivings, then schedules would be crammed with ethically dubious crowd-pleasers: Jade Goody and Paris Hilton being pecked at by sharks, or Michael Moore being tipped from tall buildings on to trampolines.

There is nothing odd about Lisa wanting to forge a link to a living person with kidney disease, so that her family might feel that her death had helped someone else.

But only in an age of reality TV might she think that the way to do this was a TV contest. A sort of “Organ Idol”. It turns an act of generosity into an uncomfortable lunge for Z-list celebrity.

Life may be a lottery. But that does not mean that turning it into a different kind of lottery is, ethically, neither here nor there.

Why not televise Death Row executions? They are going to die anyway; the deaths have been sanctioned by local voters; and it will make would-be killers think twice. Where’s the downside? The downside is having your dignity corroded by the TV carnival.

Turning donation from a matter of medicine into a contest between rivals hawking their merits like Miss World contestants pledging to devote their lives to charity, is as ethically tawdry as a recipient being chosen for their race or beliefs.

Joe Joseph the Times TV critic writes Modern Morals in times2