I love reality TV. It is fun. I watch Wife Swap every Monday evening Wife Swap is on.

On this show wives swap places. They are at each others houses for 2 weeks. During the first week they must follow the rules of the house. During the second week the wives get to change the rules and change the families life.

This is a great show. You should all check it out!

My wife likes watching both "Wife Swap", and "Trading Spouses". They're both entertaining. I guess... I'm not much on these kinds of shows. Both of them are almost like a watered-down version of Jerry Springer.

The UK one was OK when it first came out. However, as is usual with reality shows, they've set out to become more and more provocotive and I'm not that keen any more.

Some of these families have quite young children and I wonder at the mentality of someone who could leave young children with a complete strange for two weeks for the sake of being on TV.

We get the U.S.A. one here and it seems that they chose families from opposite ends of the spectrum. You know, they mix up a very strict family with one that have no rules. Obviously they are going to clash. I don't like it when the 'moms' ban the kids from doing things they love, like sports, just because they believe it's bad for them. It's crazy. Not realistic at all. But I watch it anyway because it makes me feel that I'm doing a great job as a mom and I enjoy the end when the couples get really angry at each other.

I used to watch "Wife Swap", having an insight to how other families operated was fascinating. But like all other reality television it got rather boring, once you've seen one strict mother clash with a slack one you've seen them all!
It's the same with "You are what you eat" and "How clean is your house"; they are interesting at first but an overweight person surviving on junk is much the same as another and dirty houses are dirty houses!
I suppose we like to watch them because seeing how badly other people manage their lives make us feel better about our own?
I do wonder about the people who allow television cameras into their homes, I couldn't put myself or my family through such scrutiny!

I agree Queenie, I always feel slightly smug when I watch one of these shows.

I just think they're getting more and more outrageous though - some of the people on the last series of "How Clean Is Your House" seemed in need of some sort of psychiatric intervention, rather than having a camera crew move in with them. Gillian McKeith grows more and more deranged with each series - I know it's for the cameras but the men in white coats will come for her shortly. I cringe for some of the people on that show. I can only think there's a strong streak of masochism in the British Public.

Wandering even more away from "Wife Swap", if Gillian' McKeith's lifestyle is so healthy why does she look so ill all the time?

The last clip that I saw of Gillian, she was haranguing a poor woman for..wait for it..eating a biscuit! She was prattling on about how she'd let herself down and she reduced the poor woman to tears for the heineous crime of eating a biscuit.
I'm sorry but if I'd eaten nothing but beans and pulses for weeks on end I'd be cramming more down my throat than a paltry biscuit!

I watch both of the American versions and like them. But, like the other poster, I don't like when the new mom says 'well, you can't do anything that you like to do before' - when it should just be the amount of the things (usually sports or video games) that is the real problem.

Isn't this 'swap' thing going too far? I saw one the other night when two families swapped holidays - what next?

The worst Wife Swap episode I saw was the gay guy who went to live with a religeous family (I think in the Southern part of the USA but can't remember exactly where). They would not allow him to sleep in the house so he had to go to a hotel. I wonder what they were afraid of - being converted to being gay! Dreadful stuff.

It really is painful to watch the shortcomings and quirks of everyone involved recorded on camera. Doesn't it somehow reduce us all - whoever we are - to mere cartoon characters for people to make fun of? The gay guys vs. the straight 'religious' family [ how I despise that R word]... Louisiana bikers face off with squeaky clean suburbanites...hmmm. Even though the network series development people were probably all hi -fiving each other over it's creation [ and obviously they were right about it's 'hit' potential] I still think it trivializes people's lives and tends to encourage our natural inclination to stereo - type those we know nothing about.