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Archive: participation TV

The BBC covers its own scandals; its rivals cover their tracks

25 July 2007 14:56

Categories: Current affairs, Entertainment, Newspapers, Radio, Television

It’s funny how I was writing about media hypocrisy in relation to the premium rate phone-in scandals, only for the entire issue to resurface in a major way the following day. I have the power!

Anyway, I think the way the latest revelations have been covered by the media prove my point. Predictably enough, many people have sprung up to bash the BBC for fixing competition results. And while this is indeed despicable, what these people have ignored is the fact that every single other major broadcaster has done this. This is not a problem with the BBC. It is a symptom of the state of the MSM as a whole.

Earlier this year, record fines were handed out after viewers of Channel 4 and Channel Five were defrauded. Votes cast via premium rate phone lines were not counted on ITV programmes. Today the boss of GMTV resigned.

It is worth also remembering that the BBC is the only major broadcaster in the country that hasn’t had its fingers in the utterly deceitful quiz scam channel craze that has dogged airwaves of the past two years. In this sense, the BBC looks pretty clean compared to its commercial rivals.

Because most of the faked BBC competition results (with the exception of the truly shocking Liz Kershaw ones) were of the “panicking producer” variety. Meanwhile, the commercial broadcasters built up an entire industry that was desliberately designed to misleadingly part viewers with their cash.

It is nigh on impossible to think of a commercial broadcaster that has not played a part in this massive scam. Programmes such as Quiz Call (set up and formerly owned by Channel 4; still broadcast to this day by Channel Five), ITV Play and Quiz Night Live (produced by Endemol and broadcast on a channel owned by Telewest / NTL / Virgin). Viacom’s TMF broadcast Pop the Q, Emap’s channels featured the truly dire Cash Call. BSkyB have Sky Vegas. Few commercial broadcasters are clean.

None of this is to excuse the BBC though. Encouraging viewers to use premium rate phone lines to enter non-existent competitions is unacceptable. But the BBC cases do not have nearly as strong a whiff as the ones involving its commercial rivals.

And there is not a smidgen of the hypocrisy that has come from the newspapers surrounding the premium rate scandals of this year. Newspapers were quick to jump up and down when Richard & Judy and The X Factor got caught up in it all. But they remained conspicuously quiet when it came to similar premium rate phone lines used by themselves.

Meanwhile, the BBC’s own coverage of the scandal was notable for how harsh it was on itself. I have always felt that, despite (or perhaps because of?) the constant allegations of bias, the BBC provides incredibly dispassionate coverage on any stories that involves itself.

I remember that on the day of the Hutton Report I was glued to BBC News 24. While you could argue that the BBC would be biased in favour of itself, for the same reasons Sky would be biased against the BBC.

It’s just that the magnifying glass is forever focussed on the BBC, so they cannot afford to be biased, particularly when talking about themselves. So they way they covered it was professional and detached, although there was a slightly surreal moment when you could see everyone in the newsroom rushing towards the corridor where Greg Dyke appeared. For a journalist to maintain a stiff upper lip when the story literally surrounds them in this way is seriously impressive.

I first learned about the BBC phone-in problems on BBC News 24 itself, and you would have thought that the scandal was almost as seismic as Hutton. But the problems seem to be roughly on a par with ITV’s problems with The X Factor, and certainly nothing reaching the outright deception of, say, Richard & Judy or GMTV.

And, as Matt Wardman points out:

have Sky manipulated their phone-ins? If they had, how would we find out?

That is the key. Only the BBC has the ability to be as self-critical as it is, even though it can sometimes do a lot of damage. And they never seem to get any thanks for it.

More on the fake television scandal from Scaryduck

10 comments

A problem with STV

30 April 2007 02:34

Categories: Current affairs, Entertainment, Fife, General, Make My Vote Count, Personal, Politics, Scotland, Television

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!

6 comments

The premium rate scandal has caught the wrong culprits

14 March 2007 16:49

Categories: Current affairs, Entertainment, Television

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…

3 comments

The greatest argument in favour of the license fee

24 January 2007 20:32

Categories: Current affairs, Entertainment, Internet, Politics, Radio, Technology, Television

Yesterday Ofcom criticised the BBC’s hugely promising project to get its content online and accessible on demand for free. According to Ofcom, project like BBC iPlayer “would not be in the long-term public interest”. Not too long ago a similar attack was made against the BBC’s use of podcasts.

This is the BBC using modern technology to make content more available to everybody. These are programmes that have already been paid for, being made available to more people in a much more convenient format. You would be able to watch or listen to programmes whenever it suits you. Unquestionably, license fee payers would be getting more value for money.

But apparently, the BBC doing great things like this hurts the commercial sector. I think not! Does the BBC’s iPlayer prevent ITV from creating their own similar service? Hardly. In fact, Channel 4 are already out of the blocks with their 4oD service.

The fact that more commercial broadcasters haven’t taken the same step, though, is rather telling. The problem with commercial broadcasters is that they all just roll around moaning about the license fee instead of actually thinking about what the audience wants. As the boss of (commerical) Radio Pembrokeshire said last year,

…If only other small commercial stations would stop whining about the [BBC] and offer engaging content, like us, then the commercial sector would be in less of a sorry state.

The commercial broadcasters churn out their samey middle-of-the-road rubbish and refuse to take advantage of the new technology that threatens the very existence of television as we know it. The BBC, meanwhile, is taking all of the innovative steps that are dragging the mainstream media into the 21^st century.

If the commercial sector is in trouble, they ought to take a good look at themselves rather than just pointing at the BBC. As things stand, the greatest argument in favour of the license fee is not the quality of the BBC. It is the shoddy state of commercial broadcasters, with their utter disregard for viewers.

Meanwhile, Ofcom should be embarrassed. To criticise the BBC’s ambitions to drag television into the modern world and benefit viewers as a whole makes them just look completely out of touch, particularly as they claim that such a scheme would not be in the public interest!

All the while, Ofcom turn a blind eye to — if not positively encourage — phone-in quiz shows that pollute commercial television stations. These are genuine dangers to the public interest. They don’t serve the viewers one iota (apart from the relatively decent Quizmania, which has been axed), and they downright swindle the poor people who phone in.

6 comments

BSkyB, Disney, RTL and Viacom should all be locked in or forfeit a crystal

6 January 2007 02:46

Categories: Entertainment, General, Music, Nostalgia, Radio, Television

I wonder if one of the great promises of digital television will not be kept in the long run. Theoretically, Freeview offers viewers more choice than the old five analogue channels. At first it was true. As well as the five channels we already knew, ONdigital launched with plenty of sport and film channels, childrens’ channels and a variety of other niche channels.

That’s still kind of the same with Freeview today. But Freeview is becoming a victim of its own success. There are dozens of channels on Freeview. But once you take away the shopping and quiz channels, many of the remaining channels spend much of their time broadcasting shopping and quiz programmes, or advertising their own subscription services.

Having a Freeview channel is like gold dust for a broadcaster now. But this means that if a company only has one channel on Freeview it has to make the most of what it’s got. Now, instead of each channel catering for its own niche, channels are scurrying around chasing the average viewer. So instead of having loads more choice than we did in the old days, we now have slightly more choice.

It’s a bit like local radio stations. There are millions of them, but as far as I can tell they are almost all exactly the same. Listeners don’t get choice here. They get the same bland middle-of-the-road pop music with over-excited presenters yelping over the top. I mean, how many radio stations have a slogan along the lines of “Classic hits and today’s best music, only on 97.3 Scrotum FM”? All of them?

Freeview still has a lot of quality channels. But most of the choice comes from the BBC, Channel 4 or (at a stretch) ITV. Even then, you sense that this is only because each of these broadcasters have multiple Freeview slots to fill.

Disney has one channel on Freeview: ABC1. Its diet of cheaply imported, inoffensive daytime-friendly American comedy has barely changed in years. Yawn.

BSkyB has three channels: Sky News, Sky Sports News and Sky Travel. That was, until they decided to replace Sky Travel with a general entertainment channel especially created for Freeview, Sky Three. So what about the fans of travel programmes? They’ll have to make do with gameshows that were originally shown on Sky One five years ago and cheaply imported American comedies. Boring. (Apart from Futurama, of course!)

Even Channel Five couldn’t manage to come up with interesting Freeview channels. Overnight it brings us The Great Big British Quiz, one of the worst quiz channels there is! Past the watershed, Five US is filled with wall to wall repeats of CSI. During the day we are treated to cheaply imported (imported from the past, that is) episodes of Happy Days and comedy backwater Joey. Pass me the pillow.

Five Life is so inconsequential, I won’t even go into it. All it ever seems to show is The Ellen DeGeneres Show (a cheaply imported American chat show). I shat my duvet out of boredom.

The latest culprit to contribute to the increasingly tumbleweed-infested airwaves is Viacom, whose sole Freeview channel is TMF. It used to be called The Music Factory. Just one problem. You’ll never find any music on it. This was understandable when it showed MTV programmes such as Newlyweds or Dirty Sanchez. For one thing, it brought MTV programmes into terrestrial homes which I guess you should be grateful for. And there was still a (tenuous) link to music.

But now TMF has brought into its schedule “classic comedies” such as Cheers, Ally McBeal and The Wonder Years. WTF!!! TMF is now even unrecognisable to what it was last week, never mind a few years ago! What do these programmes have to do with music?

Even the higher quality Freeview channels, such as ITV2, More4 or E4 show more than their fair share of American comedy and drama. Sky took off their travel channel to show more American programmes. MTV have changed their music channel beyond recognition to show more American programmes. Now Channel Five have an entire channel dedicated to it. So where has the variety gone? We may have more choice, but we no longer have variety.

But there is a silver lining! Ftn has been on Freeview almost since the very start, but it was easily the most uneventful channel on the lineup. This was despite all the potential. It could draw from the pool of Flextech channels, which surely have a few quality programmes to rub together. But whoever was responsible obviously didn’t care. Ftn was like a piece of shit on your shoe that you hate so much that you won’t even bother to wash it off, so instead you scrape your shoe all over the pavement as you walk along and hope that it just goes away. Yes, Ftn was exactly like that.

Until now, that is. On New Year’s Day, Ftn’s schedule was shaken up to include more quality programmes. The phone-in quiz shows and Thomas Cook TV segments have gone, and they’ve been replaced with repeats of The Crystal Maze, The Krypton Factor and Bullseye!

Wow! Those were three of my favourite programmes when I was young! The fact that these programmes are now almost twenty years old messes with my mind. What’s even more amazing is just how much of The Crystal Maze I can actually remember, despite it being made way back in 1990.

I know what you’re thinking. These are just cheap repeats like all the other stuff. Well yeah, but at least it’s not Dawson’s Creek. Now, start the fans please!

4 comments

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