France gets a taste of voyeurism with Loft Story

French terrestrial M6 has had a mixed reaction to Loft Story, a new Endemol Entertainment gameshow format that continues the voyeuristic trend started by Big Brother.

First going to air on April 26, the elimination show started out with six men and five women, selected as suitably extrovert and good looking from the 38k people who applied to take part.

The contestants are isolated in a specially-adapted house, wired for sound and riddled with close circuit cameras, with the audience voting each week to evict one person from the household, à la Big Brother.

At the end of its 10-week run on July 5, the two remaining contestants will then have to live together for a further six months in the house, which will become theirs to keep – but only if they remain together for the duration.

Loft Story, produced by Endemol’s French subsidiary ASP Productions, attracted an audience of 5.2m or a 26.1% market share when it made its broadcast debut.

Interest in the show was so intense that the accompanying website crashed within the hour after 760k internet users tried to log on.

The popularity of the 30-minute show, which is stripped Monday through Friday at 18:20, can be gauged from the fact that M6 has more than tripled its advertising rates for the time period.

A 30-second spot now costs in the region of $350k.

Predictably, Loft Story has outraged the establishment as well as the CSA, France’s state broadcasting authority, particularly as, so far, no French broadcaster has picked up the Big Brother format.

French broadsheet Le Journal du Dimanche railed about {an operation to turn the viewer into a voyeur{, and said the low tone was evident from the start when a female participant asked her co-residents: {Who farted?{

The CSA, meanwhile, has warned M6 to {exercise the greatest vigilance to avoid anything that could damage the dignity of the human person{.

More importantly, it has also ordered the terrestrial to stop using its daily broadcast of edited highlights to drive viewers to the non-stop pay-per-view satellite and internet channels.

Nevertheless, the broadcaster still has a hit on its hands. On May 10, 6.3m viewers watched the show, which captured a 76.1% audience share among the 15-24 demographic.