Oprah Winfrey Reveals Her Fairy Side

Charity should come from the heart, we’re told, but in Oprah Winfrey’s latest strike to expand her work in television, charity comes from the desire to compete in reality TV shows.“Oprah’s Big Give,” Oprah’s first reality show, makes its debut on ABC this coming Sunday at 9 p.m. on WEWS Channel 5.The main idea of the show is not new in television. “Queen for a Day” was one of the America’s most reliable media hits from the 1940s to the 1960s, first on radio and then TV. Four contestants explained the unfortunate circumstances of their lives in front of a studio audience, whose applause determined which of the women was most wretched. The winner was not only given prizes but adorned with a robe and a crown while an orchestra played “Pomp and Circumstance” for the new “queen” on her throne.The show had great success as “five thousand ‘Queen’ got what they were after. And the TV audience cried their eyes out, morbidly de- lighted to find there were people worse off than they were, and so they got what they were after,” producer Howard Blake wrote in a magazine article quoted in Maxene Fabe's "TV Game Shows" book.Keeping the same idea, “Oprah’s Big Give” follows 10 ordinary people, who are assigned a family and given five days in which to change their lives for the better, either by raising money for necessities or providing emotional care during a distressing point in the families’ lives. Some of the contestants have stories as emotional as the needy people they’re supposed to help. There are homeless mothers, a marine wounded in Iraq, a young woman who was the victim of a drunk driver and recalls how she became a paraplegic after the accident and another woman who was sexually abused and physically abused as a child