The lavish ceremonies, with catered parties and the best hotels that Baghdad can offer, are brought to Iraqi televisions every week in the hit show Best Wishes, one of a slew of reality TV programmes that are captivating a people more used to watching news footage of death on their doorsteps.

Good news in Baghdad is as rare as the electricity that has largely failed to flow two years after the invasion. In the face of relentless grimness, television companies have decided to conjure up their own happy endings and have tapped into a lucrative market at the same time.

Reality television shows organise weddings for the poor, medical aid abroad for sick children, a pension lottery for the elderly and the reconstruction of bombed houses. One programme, called Among the People, is simply a cameraman walking through some of the few areas where people still brave the bombs to venture out of an evening.

“It’s absolutely a big success,” said Majid al-Samarrai, a senior producer for Sharqiya private television, which has pioneered the new generation of reality TV. “We see the happiness on the faces of the people whose houses we have rebuilt and those still waiting because of the American destruction during the war.”

So far his show has rebuilt five houses, including one wrecked by a car bomb, and delivered $1,000 pension bonuses to dozens of elderly people who would otherwise only scrape by.

On one occasion the Sharqiya team went to the lawless Shia town of Amarah, where British troops are based, to deliver a lump sum to a lucky pensioner. They went to the winner’s house and were greeted by the family. But some locals told the crew that the house had been taken over by bandits who were masquerading as the winning family, planning to take the money and then hold the crew to ransom. With the help of some townspeople the team managed to escape.

In another case the team helped a man who had adopted three orphans he had found begging outside a Baghdad restaurant. The children said that their parents were killed in an American attack. Pledges of aid flooded in from an indignant Arab public across the Gulf. Like many of Baghdad’s wild stories, however, it proved to be untrue. One of the viewers who saw the show turned out to be the children’s abusive father, from whom they had run away: he turned up demanding that the children be returned.

All of which makes for great television, of course. Unused to such tabloid fare and bored with bombs but too afraid to leave their homes, Iraqis have turned to “reality” in droves. Sharqiya’s shows are now carried on three satellites, beaming Iraq’s meagre ration of happiness across the region.

But it is not all escapism. The new media freedom has also allowed serious investigative journalism to flourish. Iraqiya, sponsored by the State, runs a show whose intrepid reporters covertly film corrupt bureaucrats, trying to dispel the Saddam-era myth that such people are untouchable. The show recently exposed a ring of officials who sell passports — which should be free — for $100 each.

People e-mail their complaints to the studio, which then selects which cases to investigate. The idea was an instant success in a country where the government is widely seen as unaccountable, locked up behind fortress walls guarded by American troops.

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