Blue Peter is in the news at the moment because it is losing a show per week. So it will be going back to two programmes per week, just like it was up until the mid-1990s. And this is not long after it went down from five shows per week.

Of course, like most decent people, I am outraged. But if I was in the programme’s target audience, would I give a monkey’s? Probably not.

When I was actually in Blue Peter’s target audience, I thought Blue Peter was one of the most boring programmes in the world. I just couldn’t understand the appeal.

There were only two different things that ever happened on Blue Peter. The first type involved a twatty presenter abseiling — and the presenters of my era were twatty. Take your pick from Tim Vincent, Stuart Miles or — worst of all — Katy Hill. No bloody wonder I didn’t watch it.

The other type involved making some rubbish makeshift doll’s house out of a bunch of ropey catchphrases. Here’s one I made earlier, sticky back plastic, yes, yes I get it. Ha ha ha.

Apart from that, I have no real memories of the programme from my childhood. In fact, all of my strongest memories of the programme are from when I was in my mid-teens.

Now I am more mature, and I think that Blue Peter is an important institution which is what puts the Great in Great Britain, or something like that. But here is the problem with Blue Peter: it is not aimed at children at all. It is aimed at adults or, more specifically, parents.

Most children’s programmes are, actually. You only had to look at the reaction to Dick and Dom In Da Bungalow, which split people into two camps: children and parents. The parents were shocked that Dick and Dom did not educate, and raised their arms in horror at the ‘Bogies’ game.

But these elements of no-holds-barred immaturity — and the fact that it didn’t provide advertising slots for the shit boy bands that are usually the staple of Saturday morning television — were precisely what kids found entertaining. As for me, the first time I saw it I was actually crying with laughter. I think it would be a sad state of affairs if po-faced parents banned children from being children.

That is why I am suspicious about the Blue Peter institution. I don’t find it offensive, but I think the reason it exists is to keep adults happy. Blue Peter is mostly about mythology and nostalgia more than anything else. It’s about watching the new presenter fail to flip a pancake. It’s about sticky back plastic and “here’s one I made earlier”. It’s about “what a lovely pair of knockers”. It’s about that elephant that did a massive shit on the floor.

But children don’t care about any of that stuff. If children like it as much as adults do, then that’s fair enough. But I suspect that they don’t. Part of me hopes that Blue Peter exists for as long as television exists. Part of me suspects that it really ought to be consigned to nostalgic clip shows.

Long term readers of this blog will know that I am not a big fan of phone-in quizzes. So when the recent controversy surrounding premium rate phone lines I was quite pleased. But now I think it has turned into media bandwagon.

More and more instances of dodgy goings-on are being sniffed out by the media. The problem is, each subsequent new problem is less important than the last one. Now the premium rate phone lines look a bit amateurish — but not evil, which is what they actually are.

Not that I have any sympathy for the viewers who phone in time after time and somehow expect not to be charged. Take the fuss surrounding Channel Five’s Brainteaser. There were a few instances where the producers were unable to find anybody who had a correct answer among the ten random names and numbers supplied by the people in charge of the phone lines.

If you have ever watched Brainteaser, you will know just how cretinous you have to be to get the answer wrong. The most common puzzles on Brainteaser are are a bit like anagrams, but instead of all the letters being jumbled up, groups of letters are jumbled up. A typical example (stolen from here) is “LL WA PER PA”.

Not too difficult is it? To be honest, I don’t blame the producers for not having a contingency plan in case they can’t find somebody out of a list of ten people who can’t get the correct answer. It might have been misguided for them to make up fake names of non-winners, but this smacks more of panicking producers on a live TV show who don’t know what to do rather than the pure evil that can be found on other quiz channels.

Then there is the hoo-ha over The X Factor, where viewers were charged a bank-breaking 15 pence. I mean, most people probably drop that amount of money every day without realising it. And if you can’t spare that extra 15 pence, what on earth are you doing using premium rate phone-in lines where your chances of affecting the result are approximately zero?

Channel 4’s The Morning Line got in trouble for charging callers who were stupid enough to phone up after it was announced that the lines were closed. If the phrase “phone lines are now closed” isn’t enough to stop you phoning in, then you really have nothing to complain about.

And now we have got to the point where children are being dragged into the whole thing. A Blue Peter phone-in competition where proceeds went to charity fell victim to a technical glitch. Much like the Brainteaser instance, a panicking member of the production put a child who happened to be visiting the studio on the air to pose as a competition entrant.

Note the final couple of paragraphs in the story:

But Ms Zahoor, whose information led to the discovery, says she thinks the BBC’s reaction is “silly”.

“I didn’t realise that it would be blown out of all proportion,” she said, adding that she had refused to lodge a formal complaint about the show.

Again, it was probably misguided, but it is hardly the deception and near fraud that you find on some channels. I can’t actually imagine how lame the next “premium rate phone call revelation” is going to be. 999 lines open instead of the 1,000 promised? Comic Relief is going to be fun this year!

What really gets me the most about this storm is the fact that the very worst examples of the genre are getting away with it. The media is after the big names like Britain’s finest comedy duo Richard and Judy, Saturday Kitchen, The X Factor and Blue Peter.

But the quiz channels themselves — entire channels that are devoted to these controversial competitions — are carrying on pretty much as normal. There was a slightly eerie evening recently when there was only one of these on Freeview — Big Game TV on Ftn (how different would it be if this channel were called ‘Virgin’, its true colours?). But TMF’s Pop the Q was only gone for one evening due to a technical problem.

Channel Five dropped Quiz Call in the wake of the Brainteaser problems, but Quiz Call itself carries on as normal on Sky. The ITV Play channel has been axed by ITV, but only because it wasn’t making enough money!

These might be signs that the phone-in quiz television genre has hit the rocks. But the genre’s coat has been on a shoogly nail for ages. You can tell that with all the chopping and changing that has been going on, such as when Channel 4 sold Quiz Call (I bet they’re mighty glad they sold it now!) and the musical chairs involving Ftn’s, Channel Five’s and even ITV’s quiz slots.

ITV Play only makes money on its late-night ITV1 slot and apparently often made a loss during the day. The channel probably would have closed anyway — it’s just that now was a convenient time to close it.

With this controversy, programmes like the relatively innocuous Richard & Judy are being castigated, while the actually evil Make Your Play has technically been given the all-clear.

I mean, at least the competitions on Richard & Judy and the like have well-defined rules and everybody gets pretty much what is expected. On the quiz channels, on the other hand, callers are taken arbitrarily (even during ’speed rounds’, even when the presenters are promising that they are taking “as many calls as they can”).

The questions are vaguely-defined such as the tower guessing games (where is the skill in that?, as a couple of Resonance FM presenters might say) or the downright deceitful ‘add the numbers / pennies / circles / whatever’ games. And they never tell you how they get to the answers. These are the real premium rate scams, but somehow everybody is now focussing on charity-funding competitions for children.

Finally, a big thumbs down goes to Icstis, the so-called regulatory body for premium rate phone lines. That is has taken this media bandwagon to finally get Icstis to levitate their big arse over problems that are in some cases several months old is shocking. The shouldn’t have to wait for the media to do their job for them.

Notably, The Hits has ditched its frankly diabolical Cash Call slot. Apparently this programme was actually beamed from Hungary (and the programme was often fronted by presenters whose grip of English wasn’t too great). Quite fishy.

Anyway, enjoy this clip of it on YouTube. As you can see, it is deceptively boring — a good cure for insomnia at that time of night perhaps? On the other hand, it is classic car-crash television, and it is fascinating just for how boring it is.

Update: Qwghlm Twitters his view:

ZOMG Blue Peter cheatery! Meanwhile, the Trident bill is going through the House…

I recently read a webpage that talked about events from 1994. I was surprised at how much I remembered — I was only 8.

The BBC Editors blog asks, what do you remember from the news from when you were nine? Use Wikipedia to take a look. I’m using 20^th March 1995–19^th March 1996. Here’s what I remember:

• Oklahoma bombing
• French nuclear tests
• O.J. Simpson trial
• Brent Spar oil rig disposal debate
• John Major resigning then unresigning
• The huge success of (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?
• US government offices closing
• Rosemary West being found guilty
• Deep Blue beating Garry Kasparov
• Dunblane massacre

I am quite surprised by the number of major events that completely passed me by, others that I never learned about until years later (e.g. Nick Leeson), while there are other stories that I remember so vivdly. I’m amazed that some of these happened when I was nine. I thought I was about 14 when Rosemary West was found guilty.

I was definitely a bit of a news junkie by the time I was nine though. I always came home for lunch from school, and I always watched the news because it was the only interesting thing on.

This brings us on to the whole cause of this news nostalgia. Newsround is now aimed at a younger audience: 9 years old and under. Cue the inevitable accusations of dumbing down, despite the fact that Newsround has always been a “dumb” news programme because it’s aimed at children, which are mostly pretty stupid people.

But what is the use in a dumbed down news programme, whether it’s the ITV Lunchtime News or Newsround? I hated Newsround when I was a child; I never watched it. The reason is simple. When I wasn’t interested in the news I didn’t want to watch Newsround. When I became interested in the news, I wanted to watch the news, not some patronising children’s TV presenter giving me news-lite or some boring story about a panda taking a shit.

This is the same reason why the DCMS’s big idea of getting BBC Three to do yoof news (which I mentioned in my previous post) completely flopped. I actually quite liked BBC Three’s news programme because it was sometimes quite amusing, and it was generally quite a good programme. But I didn’t watch it because of the news it gave me. I liked BBC Three news for what it was, but I didn’t kid myself on that I was watching the news. Deep inside I knew that if I actually wanted to watch the news I would have been watching Channel 4 News or News 24.

This is such a simple idea, but broadcasters don’t seem to grasp it. If you want the news — whether you’re 9, 20 or 50 — you are going to watch the actual news, not the news pretending to be something else, or something else pretending to be the news, or some kind of pseudo-news aimed at a particular demographic.

Via Currybet.

I’ve just seen Ortis from CBBC presenting on Quiz Call. Bahahaha. I hadn’t realised he’d sunk so low. He is still as irritating a presenter as always. But Peter Simon will always be my favourite children’s television presenter turned Egyptian cotton towel flogger. Ironic thing is that Ortis used to present children’s consumer programme Short Change. Now he’s working for one of the scammiest channels in the business.

Blue Peter have relaunched their badges scheme.

Under the new system, a unique photo card will also be needed to enter the attractions. Previous winners can apply for a card on the Blue Peter website.

The idea for the new scheme came from 11-year-old viewer Helen Jennings.

Jennings wrote in to the show with a prototype design for the security card, Blue Peter editor Richard Marson said.

“On Blue Peter many of the best ideas come directly from the audience and this was no exception,” he said.

“As a result, she’s won her silver badge and really helped all the genuine Blue Peter badge winners out there who’ve been so upset at the suspension.”

I hate this. Nobody is fooled. An 11-year-old did not invent the photocard.