La Sposa Perfetta (The Perfect Bride) was purchased for RAI, the Italian state broadcaster, from Turkey, where it has been a smash hit but, in the view of critics, the Anatolian countryside was where it deserved to remain.

"The formula, " raged Cristiana Muscardini, a rightwing politician, "is absolutely noxious for the dignity of women and restores male dominance in ways that are unacceptable."

Natalia Aspesi, an acidtongued commentator for La Repubblica, agreed. "What muck this is!" she wrote in the Roman daily yesterday. "If we are talking about a game to amuse the easygoing masses, it bears saying that state television really needs to put a limit to the rubbish, the vulgarity, the lies, the rudeness and the denial of social changes that happened 50 years ago."

In the programme, five single men between the ages of 26 and 31 and their mothers get to look over 18 gorgeous young women. Over the next nine episodes, the mothers will decide which (if any) of the nubile contenders would be worthy to keep house and bear children for their darling sons.

In the first programme, the older women fired questions at the younger ones and gave their initial impressions. Now they all move Big Brother-style to a villa east of Milan, where the mammas will subject their juniors to first-degree motherin-law torture to see which survives. Viewers will be invited to boot out the women they most despise.

The show comes at a delicate juncture for RAI. Its president, Claudio Petruccioli, said earlier this month that he hoped RAI would stop airing reality shows because they "put people into environments that are both unrealistic and coercive, leading inevitably to unreasonable if not degrading behaviour." He added that such shows ran counter to RAI's mandate as a publicservice broadcaster.

But the reality shows have been a money-spinner for the company. L'Isola dei Famosi (The Island of the Famous), for example, cost 8m to produce but yielded 15m in advertising revenue. And with the production company responsible threatening to go to Berlusconi's Mediaset, this week the board of RAI voted to go ahead with La Sposa Perfetta.

Antonio Marano, director of the channel screening the show, claimed the programme "brings to the light of day relationships that are eternal. You can joke about it but we are talking about problems of behaviour that many people live with."

But for Natalia Aspesi, it was the unreality of this reality show that was the most striking thing about it. "The viewers see it for what it is, " she wrote, "not reality but a perfunctory fiction with amateurish actors and banal scenery."