I see that STV, Scotland’s only major commercial broadcaster, is not providing coverage of the election on Thursday evening. Quite surprising if you ask me. Most people turn to the BBC for election coverage, granted. But you expect ITV / STV to make an effort nevertheless.

I couldn’t remember, but apparently STV did have a programme in 2003. And ITV will have election coverage for Wales. BBC Scotland does have coverage going on all night.

No doubt STV’s decision is a result of having to look after the pennies. Instead of the election, we will be getting ITV conathon Make Your Play. Interesting that ITV and the BBC aren’t having any bother having local election coverage…

I have another problem with another STV though — the voting system being used for the council elections. In principle, I am a big fan of the Single Transferable Vote, and I was pleased when the voting system was changed from FPTP. But I have to admit to feeling quite underwhelmed by the result.

It seems as though the parties are being conservative. Presumably fearful of splitting the vote, parties are only fielding as many candidates as they can possibly hope to win. In most cases, this is one. And while STV gives voters more choice on paper, this extra choice has actually made me feel a bit suffocated.

In my ward, three councillors will be elected. Labour are fielding two candidates (not too long ago they would have fielded three, I am sure). Meanwhile, the SNP, the Lib Dems, the Conservatives and Solidarity have one candidate each.

So in this three seat ward, only six candidates from five parties are standing. By contrast, last time round, most of the parties would have had a candidate in each of the three old wards.

I have a lot of problems with this. For starters — although I am not suggesting that this is actually the case — it does look as though the parties have already carved the seats up between them.

Labour have two candidates, the Lib Dem will probably get in (although, as I said before, it would have been three Labour councillors not so long ago) and the SNP candidate probably has an outside chance. So where is the ambition from the parties? Why can’t Labour believe that it might win three seats, or even the Lib Dems or SNP believe that they could win two?

If there is some swing in opinion, it won’t be reflected in the ballot box, because neither of the incumbent parties have given themselves any chance of increasing the number of councillors. And none of the other parties have put in anything other than token efforts.

In short, the choice just isn’t there. I have six votes, and there are three seats up for grabs. But if I want to vote for three candidates, or even two, I will have to do a Toynbee and get the nosepegs — and sick bags — out.

Usually I vote for the Liberal Democrats because I think ideologically they are the party that is closest to me. Then it is a process of elimination. Labour are ruled out by default for being Labour. I don’t see myself voting for Solidarity, and I don’t find the Conservatives too appealing either.

So my second vote will probably go to the SNP candidate, which I don’t mind too much, despite my views on independence. But beyond that, it is a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea. And the Judean People’s Front.

I might have been a bit naive. I was imagining massive ballot papers with parties fielding two or three candidates each. Instead, the parties have decided in advance how many seats they are going to win, and have begrudgingly put forward that number of candidates. This poor showing from the parties is a bit bleak, and not the choice I was hoping for.

Still better than First Past the Post though!

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…

My views on quiz channels are fairly well documented on this blog. But among the shameless scammers and gormless presenters there was one clear ‘least worst’ phone-in quiz programme — Quizmania. And it’s been axed. The final programme is on tomorrow at 10pm.

What does it say that the one quiz programme that seemed to care a little bit about its viewers and paying contestants is the one that had to be dumped by ITV? Most quiz channels part viewers with their cash by setting puzzles that look easy, but are actually extremely difficult. Difficult because they never tell you the method of getting the answer.

Add the numbers is a notorious example. It is said that producers sometimes decide to count hidden Roman numerals in a piece of text as numbers! Count the pennies is another one. You really might as well just pick a random number, which is what many callers undoubtedly do. Ofcom regulations say that games must involve skill and not luck. Luck would make it a lottery and the quiz channel would have to give much of its taking to charity. Quizmania was different. It never got any worse than the relatively innocuous “tower” games.

But that wasn’t the reason I liked Quizmania. The reason was that Quizmania was genuinely entertaining. Due to the nature of the genre, quiz television is probably the closest television comes to the style of presenting more common on radio. By necessity, you get to know a presenter’s on-screen persona pretty well. This helps if a presenter actually has a personality.

Most quiz channels are fronted by totally gormless presenters who have nothing to say. It is more like World Championship Stare-Out than a phone-in quiz.

Quizmania, on the other hand, has the amazing Greg Scott (warning: link contains music that automatically plays!). What a guy. Scary inside-out knowledge of gameshows. Here is ten minutes of him in action:

Part of what made Quizmania amazing was the way the crew got involved as well. Other programmes may try to involve the crew, but they will never do it as well as Quizmania has done it. Flash is incredible! Who knew that a camera operator could be so entertaining?!

When the rockstar in waiting was allegedly banned from appearing on camera he got around the ban by holding cardboard cutouts and doing hilarious impressions of Morgan Freeman (”I played God!”) and Paul McCartney. Flash ought to have his own programme really.

This week probably hasn’t been a pleasant one for the Quizmania crew, as one by one the regular presenters have done their last shows. It is clear that everybody involved in the show genuinely loved working on Quizmania. Poor Lee Baldry was in tears.

Meanwhile, Make Your Play, which is what has replaced Quizmania on ITV1, is an utterly characterless programme. It reminds you that at its heart, quiz television is all about making money from callers; not keeping viewers entertained. Quizmania was a gem because it did both — and it wasn’t as deceitful at parting viewers with cash as many other quiz programmes are.

Don’t forget that Quizmania is the programme that was so successful for ITV1 that it led to the launch of ITV Play. It feels like an injustice. There will be many who think that Quizmania should not be forgiven for being part of the phone-in quiz disease that’s ruined late-night television over the past couple of years. But I think it should be applauded for making an otherwise dire format fun.

• Quizmania 2005-2007 thread on TV Forum

Luckily, many of Quizmania’s best moments have been immortalised on YouTube forever, and I present a mini Quizmania YouTube extravaganza below the fold. Unfortunately, many of my favourite moments of the past year and a bit aren’t on YouTube, but I’ve done the best I can.

Click for more »