Frances Grant: Rescue the human lab rats

Can someone please place a moratorium on reality television's experiments on live humans until we ascertain whether this tinkering is safe for us and the environment?

Unfortunate and dangerous experiments are being conducted all over the box. On the diet-discipline show Downsize Me, we see what happens when fat people are forced to live like thin people and, for some inexplicable reason, vice versa.

The fat person's part of the experiment is reasonable enough. The hypothesis is that eating less and doing more exercise will cause the subject to lose weight and be healthier. And so it proves.

The skinny person, who is called the "crash diet dummy", is forced to guzzle mountains of pizza, chocolate biscuits by the box load and to lie without moving on the couch. They complain of feeling sick and having strange bowel motions. I think we might be able to figure out these results without subjecting some poor blighter to the test. Surely there are regulations against this kind of cruelty without purpose?

TV One's new reality series calls itself - without irony - The Big Experiment. It offers willing participants the chance to walk in someone else's shoes for a day: to find out what it's like to be the opposite sex or a different race, via an elaborate makeover and much training.

Out in the field, the subjects have to test whether they can act convincingly in their new role and share what they learn from the experience.

Do not mistake this show for anything remotely scientific. This is an exercise in applying sophisticated makeup techniques and developing the acting and fake accent ability of its participants. The lab equipment is clothes, wigs, prosthetic penises and breasts. The Big Experiment should more accurately be called "Fun with Fake Tan and Rubber". A bit of latex gives Rosy, a young Pakeha woman, Asian eyes, a startling accompaniment to her obviously European bone structure. Mike gets a fatter looking chin, huge nose, a moustache and a bad haircut with the aim of making him look like a Middle Eastern, um, caricature?

The results, too, are sometimes alarming. The first episode's gender swap test offered us this kind of highly regressive insight: "Women are feelers and men are thinkers." Oh I see. Obviously the analytical part of the brain in women is like nipples on men: a redundant evolutionary feature.

We also learned that it's easier for women to talk the male talk and walk the male walk than for men to do vice versa without feeling like they're in drag. Well, knock me down with a purple feather boa.

On the bright side, the race episode showed how willing Kiwis are to suspend disbelief to avoid hurting feelings. For example, nobody told Mike, posing as a door-to-door salesman, to shove off for looking like a pantomime terrorist.

The guinea pigs have to be commended for their forbearance. In the sex swap episode we learned that you can take a builder out of his comfort zone and give him fake breasts, a frock and heels, but you can't take the builder out of the builder. "I am a builder by trade, builders are inherently builders - male, macho and the rest of it," said a very unhappily feminised Danny.

Danny was in deep existential crisis after the body wax and French manicure and who could blame him. Surely the experiment would've been more honest if the show's psychologist explained that the thought of undergoing such processes makes a fair proportion of women feel suicidal, too.

Someone really should think about rescuing such victims of telly's unfortunate experiments. Where are the People for the Ethical Treatment of People when you need them?