About a week ago I expressed relief that the new Freeview channel, smileTV, wasn’t yet another quiz channel. Unfortunately I was wrong.

That groovy Shortcutters programme was only there for the first night. Apparently now it’s been shunted to 4:15am, which even I am not prepared to stay up for. Instead, between 1am and 4:15am we now have ‘Quizworld’, and it reaches a new low for both Freeview and the entire ‘Participation TV’ genre. Impossible surely?!

smileTV’s Ofcom license is for a “general entertainment” channel. Well, it’s certainly entertaining, but perhaps not in the intended way.

It is honestly the cheapest thing I have ever seen on Freeview by a long way, and that’s saying something. It literally looks like it’s coming from somebody’s bedroom. They seem to just stick a couple of bimbos in front of a blue background and tell them to repeat the phone number over and over again.

Every time I’ve tuned in to the programme there seems to be some kind of horrendous technical problem. Last night they were even struggling to get a ‘Back Soon’ slide to stay on air for at least ninety minutes. One-by-one the graphics came on the screen until all they needed on screen were the presenters. And just when it looked like they were going to do it, it went all black again! Very strange. It’s all going wrong for Freeview. How has such an amateurish channel managed to get a slot on Freeview? They’re supposed to go for millions these days!

Worst of all, this Quizworld stuff actually seems to be even more scammy than the other quiz channels. It’s £1 per phone call and £1 + standard rate per text. You’re only allowed one free web entry per day. And once you’ve entered they can send you spam as well! Quizworld / smileTV is apparently from the same people who brought us Grab a Grand on satellite — from the looks of this thread on Digital Spy, it really is unbelieveable that they haven’t been shut down yet.

• Thread about smileTV on Digital Spy