Turkey's deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmu? has announced that the government is to ban several popular television dating shows which do not fit in with 'traditions and customs'. He said: 'There are some strange programmes that would scrap the institution of family, take away its nobility and sanctity.'
Despite the popularity of such shows, there has been thousands of complaints. Kurtulmu? said in an interview: 'We are working on this and we are coming to the end of it. God willing, in the near future, we will most likely remedy this with an emergency decree.
'God willing, we will meet these societal demands.'
Kurtulmus described the dating shows as counter to the 'customs, traditions, beliefs, the Turkish family structure and the culture of Anatolian lands'.

He hit back at those who claimed they were ratings successes: 'So what the ratings are very high and thus the advertising revenue is high? Let there not be that kind of advertising revenues.'

The Turkish religious affairs agency Diyanet criticised dating shows last month saying they 'exploited family values and desecrated the family institution by stepping on it'.

Despite being a Muslim-majority nation, modern Turkey is built on secular values la!d down by its founder, Mustafa Atatürk Kemal in 1923 but critics say President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) have been sliding towards conservative Islam.