As poor punchlines go, it would embarrass even Jim Davidson. The makers of the hoax Big Donor Show were doing it to raise awareness in the Netherlands of the lamentable shortage of kidney donors? Really? That sounds as specious as Channel 4’s amusing suggestion during the last series of Celebrity Big Brother that broadcasting Jade Goody abusing Shilpa Shetty encouraged a worthy debate about racism in Britain.

The problem is that this caper is neither socially-responsible awareness-raising television, nor a modern twist on the innocence of Candid Camera-style TV.

Viewers were salivating to watch not because they were eager to learn about the plight of those seeking kidney transplants, but because they thought they would be tuning in to another racy postpub freakshow, only with higher stakes. Like junkies who need forever larger doses of their pet drug to achieve the same thrill, watchers of this kind of programme now seek more and more shameless behaviour by participants to persuade them to stay tuned.

You doubt it? Then just tune in to gawp at the freaks that Channel 4 has assembled for its latest series of Big Brother – the sort of people you would sear your own eyeballs with a blowtorch to avoid ever having to meet in person.

With this confected controversy, Endemol has not only lowered the bar for tawdriness on telly, they have turned organ donation into a subject for Zoo TV by sucking three genuine kidney-seekers into their hoax by persuading them that – far from trivialising their life-and-death predicaments – they’d be making a powerful contribution to a national medical debate.

The Big Donor Show hoax is product of an age where every citizen believes they are now born with an entitlement to live in a democracy, to trial by a jury of their peers, and to a streak of TV fame; even if all they have to offer is their imminent death. That’s why people were so easily duped into falling for this hoax. Such behaviour in the jaws of death no longer seems to them that outrageous. They were ready to settle down on their sofas with their phone-in pizzas and prepare to text their vote for which prospective recipient they felt should be blessed – by the grace of God of reality TV – with an extension of life.

To audiences, it was just Any Dream Will Do, but for spicier stakes. Does that sound like socially responsible television to you?