Wife Swap - Channel 4

...year’s zoo like Big Brother, Wife Swap provides a refreshing and still comprehensible variety of reality television. Although more commonly referred to as a documentary what we are actually doing by watching the families every move is turning it into a reality TV programme. And by no means is this a bad thing at all! For those of you who have somehow managed to avoid seeing Wife Swap or even an advert for it here’s a quick insight into it… Wife ...
...the place of the swapped wife and live within that household, finally getting revenge in the latter 5 days by being allowed to alter any rules so as to run the household how they feel is correct. Now you’re probably all thinking that sounds quite average, what’s so entertaining about it, well what Channal 4 producers do is to choose two completely opposite, and often fairly controversial families so as to ensure that fireworks will go off at all ...

s_jones_2003 13.07.2004 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Wife Swap - Channel 4

Wife swap is basically about 2 families that are the complete opposite. The wives swap places and leave a manual of how they run the house for the other woman to follow. After a week (and plenty of shouting and swearing) the ‘wife’ tells the family everything they cant stand and the rest of the family have to live by their rules for the second week. It invariably ends in tears. After the second week is over the 2 couples meet up to ‘talk’ about how ...
...and swap houses. The wife is able to wander around the house and read the manual before they have to meet the family from hell with which they have to spend the next 2 weeks. The families come home and meet the substitute wife and everyone is on their best behaviour. Everyone tells the cameramen how lovely these people are, yucky yucky soppy stuff. Then a couple of hours later when the dinner isn’t cooked (or burnt) in exactly the way their wife ...

l1nda 08.07.2004 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Wife Swap - Channel 4

...for 10 days. Each wife lives in the other wife’s home, by her rules and her routine for the first 5 days. What is it like to cope with someone else’s children or live according to someone else’s daily routine? After 5 days, the new wife can change the household ‘rules’. What impact does this have on the family? After the 10 days are up, both families meet up. They share experiences and discuss what they have learned. What is wrong with the way each ...
...is not the best way. Wife Swap's favourite way of creating conflict is to swap families that contrast strongly with each other. For example, trading a working-mother with a stay-at-home wife, thereby pitting all those sensitive issues about career vs. family. Another hot conflict is to swap one traditional wife (who does everything around the house) with a modern wife (with the husband helping cook, clean and look after the children). In past episodes, ...

Maia 09.10.2003 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Wife Swap - Channel 4

Intro: ------- When Wife Swap started on Channel 4 a few years ago it was a very good programme with a very simple but strong format. Sadly the new series, which started on Channel 4 last week with a celebrity episode involving the rather disgusting John McCirick and Edwina 'famous for sleeping with John Mayor' Currie, is definately past its sell by date, with exactly the same stereotypes and arguments. Namely, take one snobby person and swap them ...
...of you not familiar with Wife Swap, the title is pretty self-explanatory. One wife from one family is swapped with one wife from another family. They then live with their adoptive families for two weeks, with the wives having the opportunity to implement their own rules after a week. At the end of the programme, which lasts an hour, the families meet to discuss what has happened and how they can be better families. Sometimes during a particularly ...

bigmike33 11.10.2006 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Wife Swap - Channel 4

...their target audience. But like Wife Swap, the early series were best as they quickly went from "social experiments" to vehicles for people to be just on TV doing the silliest of things. Wife Swap was perhaps the worst for this, soon deteriorating into fat uncouth working-class people slagging each other off between cigarettes and swigging canned lager, inviting a more sneering viewer to tune in. The first two series were interesting as you had middle-class ...
...on it became sink estate wife mixing with upwardly mobile working-class and lots its spark, the couples too samey. There has to be a contrast for these shows to work. Basically these were people plodding along in dead end marriages using the TV show as some kind of therapy to sort out their relationships. We would get to the final showdown bit in the hotel and the two couples were like snarling Rotweilers on the lead ready to go at each others necks, ...

thedevilinme 18.10.2009 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Wife Swap - Channel 4

...into a fight as one wife criticises another. Often a wife will deny what she wrote in her own manual. She might have said her husband neglects her if the 'new' wife makes that statement, all hell can break loose . The majority of couples tend to be pretty civil, although a fair few do argue - and even rarer, two couples might become firm friends at the end of it . The wives then go back to their families, and we are then informed of any changes that ...
...£37,500 a year . Following wife swap, she was a little bit of a celebrity, appearing on Kilroy and the Weakest Link,a nd doing lots of interviews for magazines and newspapers. She failed to declare her earnings from these appearances and interviews though,and was charged with benefit fraud , given 30 hours of community service , and ordered to pay back £2400 . Bad publicity for her, great publicity for the show I would imagine . I very much enjoy ...

Thehonesttruth 21.08.2009 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Wife Swap - Channel 4

...Channel 4’s ‘life change’ output, Wife Swap is classic water-cooler tv. By which I mean it gets the nations office workers gossiping beside the water-cooler – that sure sign of television success. Last years series provided us with some gems – who could forget Barry the professional gambler, who made his wife get up at 6am to make his porridge and run him to the gym? And the fat, racist couple swapped with the black professionals were beyond cringe-making. ...
...I watched last weeks Wife Swap with my jaw hanging open and a desire to hurl a brick at the screen. Turns out the rest of the viewing nation was with me, and here is why… Emma and Colin were the ‘conventional’ couple. Both attractive professionals with ‘aspirations’, they live in a nice, tidy detached house with a shiny car in the drive. Emma is blonde and softly spoken, Colin wears glasses and is clearly ‘sensitive’. Their 2.4 kids barely registered ...

ShoppingGirl 14.10.2003 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Wife Swap - Channel 4

Wife Swap is a Channel 4 programme in which the wives in two very different families change places for two weeks to experience a different kind of life. To give you an idea of what the show is like, I'll describe the episode I am currently watching. Wife A is basically a slob. She spends all her days either in bed or on the computer and is too lazy to feed her 18 month old daughter anything but junk food. Her husband works long hours as a bus driver ...
...his wife goes out to karaoke without him 4 nights a week. Wife B is a complete control freak. Her family live in a routine of military precision, with both her and her husband working long hours and rarely having any spare time to spend together. They saved up for 10 years (!) to buy the sofa of their dreams and since this purchase, wife B has fluffed it every single day and does not want anyone to sit on it! Their house looks like a showhome and ...

jesperado77 27.06.2009 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Wife Swap - Channel 4

...is so I can watch Wife Swap on C4 at 9pm!! Wife Swap is probably coming to the end of its present run having been on for a few weeks now, but I expect it will be repeated on another channel soon. This show is complete Voyeurism and you can’t help but watch it, regardless of whether you are avidly viewing or doing something else while it is on but just ‘happen’ to see the odd bit. The idea is that the TV production team consider two families, who ...
...on who is the better wife and mother (we shall move onto ‘mother’ later on). We say to each other “Can you believe how she/he spoke to her/him??” “Can you believe how messy/sparse their home was” and “How can anyone live with him/her” – oh yes, we are all making judgements on someone else’s lifestyle – but if it came to it, how would we fare in a programme that is on for fifty minutes but which has been edited from ten days worth of film? I know ...

orlando 23.10.2003 (28.07.2004) · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Wife Swap - Channel 4

Wife Swap is a show by Channel 4 which has few a few different spinoffs such as Wife Swap USA & Celebrity Wife Swap. The concept of the show is fairly simple really, two families will volunteer to be on the show and then the wives/girlfriends/partners from each family household are swapped normally for either one week or two weeks (it seems to vary from series to series and from spinoff to spinoff!). Normally it seems that the producers of the show ...
...by the rules of the wife of the household in which they are currently staying and then for the second week they get to bring in their own rules and this is normally where the problems really start with both swappers wanting to completely change things and instil rules of their household with lots of fire ensuring because of this! On most episodes there is a massive blow up argument in at least one household and then one of the wives will threaten ...

katyeverett 05.06.2009 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Wife Swap - Channel 4

...to write a review of Wife Swap, a reality television show that is shown on Channel Four. There are of course showings on other UK channels and American (or possibly even other) equivalents by now, but my review on this occasion is on the UK one. What prompted me to write this review? I feel that Wife Swap is by far the best reality TV show that is in existence, because it shows real life in a non-threatnening/ confrontational manner. OK, I also saw ...
...would search for it right here on Ciao! But anyway, back to the programme in itself. The style and layout of the programme is always the same, whereby twowomen (usually from different parts of the country) go to live with another man and his family for two weeks. During the course of the first week, the woman has to live almost an exact copy of the one that she has swapped with. She knows all about this other lifestyle, because the reall woman in ...

dynamicnurse 22.06.2009 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Wife Swap - Channel 4

...times during the week. Wife swap is one of those programmes where you could say it's predictable, in the sense that you have 2 families that will swap wives for 2 weeks. The families are usually the complete opposite to each other. One family may be materialistic and the other live off the land, away out in the sticks. The unpredictable part is watching how they try to change the other family, some are happily changed but most are shot down in flames. ...
...shown in America. Each wife writes a manual of the running of their family. The new wife will have a look around their temporary home before they are introduced to the family. During this time they will try to guess what the family is like and how it will go for the two weeks. During week 1 the wife will have to adhere to the rules in the manual as much as it may upset them. On the first day of the second week, each wife will sit down their new family ...

nay_money 07.07.2009 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Wife Swap - Channel 4

Wife Swap is about 2 wives from 2 very different families, who swap places for about 2 weeks. The programme shows the wives reactions towards other families, the families towards the wives and also the families towards each other. All of which are filmed as they fall into the place of the swapped wife and live within that household. So in the initial week, the wife has to adapt to the life style of her adopted family- just observing how things are ...
...of shouting! Channel 4 have claimed that they have spiced this series up- I just can't imagine HOW???!! As the last series had me gripped to my seat! If you are interested on going on Wife Swap visit http://www.channel4.com/life/microsites/W/wife_swap/apply.html. Thank you for reading this review on Wife Swap! ...

silvajade 26.07.2004 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: helpful
Review of Wife Swap - Channel 4

Wife swap ran for four weeks and was based on 4 different couple's who swapped partners for 10 days. The "Wife's" had to go and live with each others partners and for the first week they had to run the household how the "actual" wife ran the house. This was done by each wife leaving a manual of how they done things. After the first week the "pretend wife" could run the house how they normally do things. It was a very interesting and eye opening ...
...a bit racist (although the wife tried to deny this)and they just did not get on with their new mixed race faimiles. Whilst one family was used to letting their children run riot, lived off microwave meals and basically lived in a house full of clutter, the other family had a cooked meal every night, the children were well disciplined and the house was very tidy. As you can imagine, by the end of the first day there were problems. It even resulted ...

Lizzy1 12.02.2003 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: helpful
Review of Wife Swap - Channel 4

...had seen the trailer for Wife Swap about a week before the programme was due to air, and made a mental note to make sure I watched it. When the day finally came, I sat down in front of the tv and was absolutely glued. I could never have imagined just how interesting the programme would be, when it was based on such a simple concept. The general idea is that wife A goes to live in wife B's house, and vice versa, hence swapping families, houses, ...
...In the second week, each wife is allowed to make their own rules for their adopted household, to make it more like their own home. The first programme showed an overweight mother who only eat microwave meals (apart from a roast dinner on Sundays) swapping lives with a mother who cooked meals from scratch and lived with her boyfriend. The added spice came from the fact that the first woman was racist, and the family she went to live with were black. ...

sarky_queen 25.02.2003 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: helpful
Review of Wife Swap - Channel 4