Wife swap: With Nuzhat Ahmed And Deborah Escott
The award-winning Wife Swap continues with the Ahmed family, a strict Pakistani Muslim family who pray five times a day and choose to wear the hijab (headscarf). The backbone of their family philosophy is based on Islamic principles and their three teenage children are well-mannered, work hard and are very respectful of their parent’s wishes. Supermum Nuzhat works full time, studies, manages all the cooking and household chores, and keeps a keen eye on what her children are doing.
Deborah Escott works as an admin director for a theatre company and is the sole breadwinner in her liberal family. Husband Andy is a musician and house husband who looks after their three-year-old daughter Emily and 16-year-old Becky, Debs’s daughter from a previous relationship. Becky has recently come out as a lesbian. Will these two very different mums ever see eye to eye? How will husband Shakil react when Deborah arranges for his two teenage daughters to attend a live music gig and how does Nuzhat deal with a rebellious teenage daughter whose sexuality is a direct challenge to her religious beliefs?
Sunday 15th April Channel 4 8PM
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April 15th, 2007 at 11:37 pm
I watched the show..it was a crazy idea..the is no way those 2 families will learn anything from each other..especially the parents..they represent two extreme ends..the girls from the muslim family seemed to be more accepting to new ideas than the parents..they seemed to be unconvinced or unhappy with their lifestyle and were looking forward to trying new things…The mum from the muslim family looked like judgemental and made homophobic comments…I think that wife swap would have been more interesting if the muslim parents were british-borne rather than immigrants..as ,I guess, they would have been more accepting to different cultures.
April 20th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
i agree with kumar about the fact that the muslim family should have been from here,
I felt rather embarrased watching it.
April 23rd, 2007 at 2:53 pm
dats ma nme!!!neway, ma famo aint extreme muslims…xx
June 13th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
Saw the re-run last night and was fascinated.
Nuzhat was quite sweet in many ways, and then she kept spoiling it by being so rigid and prejudiced. She had no intention of learning anything as in her book Islam is best and is the only path anyone should follow and she can only teach, there is nothing outsiders can teach her. That annoys me.
She wanted to show that Muslims are good, kind sweet people, and this family is kind, and those kids are nice enough. The husband needs a wake up call, he’s a kind version of so many husbands/Dads in the community – I say he’s kind because he hugs and kisses his family and he doesn’t beat them or shout at them all the time, which seems to me to be par for the course in most asian families.
Families like that can never move forward because the parents never accept the validity of other people’s ways, or accept that others try to accept them – they have no concept of accepting so can’t recognise it. Their kids either grow up just like the, rebel and become outcasts from the family and in turn crappy or fulfilled members of the wider society – can go either way, or the kids manage to break free and move on while still being part of the old family.
I think my siblings and I have managed to do version 3 fairly well … we’re trying anyway.
In the show Becky hit the nail on the head when she talked about muslims having to hide who they are when tehy don’t follow the restrictive model. It sucks.
June 13th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
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