Fox Tv Urged to Drop Adoption Show

Fox TV is under pressure to abandon a scheduled adoption gameshow, Who's Your Daddy?, after thousands of people protested at the programme in which children try to identify their father for a £50,000 prize.

The mother of a five-year-old adopted daughter has led the grassroots campaign that prompted 5,000 people to complain to the network that the programme, due to be screened in the new year, is insensitive and offensive.

In each episode a young woman wins $50,000 (£27,000) if she guesses her biological father correctly from a line-up of eight men whom she meets in the course of the show. If she is wrong then one of the fake fathers pockets the money. Deborah Capone, who led the campaign, has asked for a meeting with Fox, owned by Rupert Murdoch, and for the show to be axed. She is urging Fox affiliate networks not to take the programme.

"By turning adoption reunions into a game show, Who's Your Daddy? takes an intensely personal and complex situation ... and transforms it into a voyeuristic display," Ms Capone told Reuters.

Who's Your Daddy? launches on Fox on January 3 with a 90-minute special. The network has ordered seven more episodes, but has not scheduled them.

Fox TV said the title of the programme was not a true indication of the show's content.

The executive producer, Kevin Healey, said the participants and both their biological and adoptive parents were all willing to be involved in the programme.

"Knowing what we did and the lives that we changed for the positive, I was very surprised. I expected there to be a reaction to the title, but I felt people would watch it and then make their decisions," Mr Healey told Reuters.

Before the controversy erupted Fox's head of reality, Mike Darnell, had praised the programme.

"It's the most emotional show we've ever put on the air. I guarantee you, if you have any heart, you'll be bawling at the end of the show," Mr Darnell told Variety. When a contestant ends up eliminating her real father, "she feels terrible," he said.

The show's presenter is Finola Hughes, the British actor well known in the US for starring in the long-running daytime soaps General Hospital and All My Children.

Fox is in trouble with another programme. Two weeks ago the producer of Wife Swap, RDF, announced it would sue Fox TV for at least £10m, claiming another of its reality shows was a "blatant and wholesale copycat" of its hit Channel 4 series.

RDF's director of programmes, Stephen Lambert, claimed the Fox show, Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy, was the "most clear-cut case of copyright theft in the history of the reality genre."