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.

See also Ryan Morrison’s post. Meanwhile, Mike Power puts it more succinctly.

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!

ITV’s latest late-night money-making programme is such a massive pile of arse powder that it has to be seen to be believed. I think they are sensing that the tide is turning against quiz television. The regulators will have caught up soon enough. So now they have set up a dating service called ITV Playdate.

Somehow, ITV manage to find up to a dozen people who are shameless enough to sit in a studio with laptops connecting them up to anybody who wants to phone or text them up. For £1 per go, naturally.

As you would expect on a dating show, the participants probably haven’t scored in an age and are fairly desperate. I guess you would have to be prepared to appear on national television basically saying, “I can’t get a partner any other way than by advertising this very fact on television.”

Most of them are your typical socially awkward types. Some of them are just all-out dickwads though. One ‘DJ’ who appeared on the programme seemed to genuinely think he was Goldie. He had more chains than he had teeth. He actually used ‘Bo!’ as a greeting without a hint of irony.

These people obviously never get any callers. They often cite “technical problems”. Yeah right. Something tells me the socially awkward one who’s hiding behind his hair has no problems working his computer at home.

And then sitting centre stage is the attractive young woman who has received twenty calls in the past hour. Some of the callers have gone “a bit too far” apparently. Yuk! ITV, do you see what you have done?!

This might not be at the level of Party People or the various other babestation channels which basically consist of dirty men asking for extreme closeups of the girls’ feet. But at least those channels don’t pretend otherwise. ITV Playdate acts as though it’s a classy programme, but it is not.

Now phucker has alerted us to the contents of the ITV Playdate website. And this is where the last remaining vestiges of good taste are thrown out of the top floor window, kicked around, stamped on, shat on and something elsed on that I really don’t want to say!

Presenter Brendan Courtney is aged “22 (and a bit … and the bit is my own business)”. That’s a joke already. The bit looks as though it’s at least twenty. But just wait until you see what he lists as his favourite scent.

Favourite scent: Old Spice, Bukkake.

What the fuck?! Bukkake?!? Does he even know what it is? Which wise guy at ITV thought that it would be okay to put this on the website? Aaargh!

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.

I’ve heard this on Radio Five Live’s bulletins at 1 o’clock and 2 o’clock, but strangely I haven’t found any mention of this on the internet at all.

The offices of Big Game TV have been raided. Apparently it is alleged that at certain times callers had no chance of getting through. I am shocked.

I am surprised, though, that Big Game TV is the first one to be investigated. On-screen it doesn’t seem like one of the scammiest channels — just one of the most boring.

Most might not bat an eyelid if a small Sky channel is investigated, but what could be interesting about this is that ITV have their fingers in the Big Game TV pie. When ITV first started experimenting with participation TV on ITV3 and ITV2 it was simulcasting Big Game TV. Now Big Game TV makes The Daily Quiz, which is broadcast on Men & Motors and ITV Play.

Quiz channels, or ‘participation TV’ as the broadcasters prefer to call it, are a little bit of a hobby horse of this blog. The channels like to set impossible puzzles and they never explain the solutions. Essentially this turns the whole process into a lottery, as callers end up guessing a random number. Callers pay 60p or £1 per entry, and every so often somebody wins £50 or something.

ITV Play’s participation TV programming is said to make £2m per month. Goodness knows how much the others must be making then, because ITV’s programmes usually seem the most respectable of all of them (although I have noticed while flicking through that The Mint is beginning to set those ridiculous ‘add the numbers’ games).

Here is an interesting discussion about Grab a Grand, a programme on Sky digital which recently set up a channel, SmileTV, on Freeview. According to the DS forummers, Grab a Grand staff members are blatantly phoning up their own channel with wrong answers. And there is Who needs shopping channels? on this blog, which had some interesting comments before it got swamped by idiots who wanted to sling mud around…

If anything happens as a result of the raid, you can bet that quiz channels will find a way round it. When AuctionWorld was closed a couple of years ago for displaying grossly inflated ‘guide prices’, the other shopping channels merely replaced their ‘guide prices’ with ’start prices’.

Update: Finally, I can bring you a link. But it’s of a radio programme! Come on internet, you’re meant to be the future! (Via TV Forum.)

Update (20/05/2006): The Daily Quiz has been replaced by This Morning Puzzle Book on ITV Play today (This Morning at 6pm!).

Also, according to Sascha on this thread, The Mint makes £100,000 per night!

Update (21/05/2006): Sascha at TV Forum again:

The overnight quiz game on The Hits, Smash Hits etc. music channels, is actually broadcast from a scruffy building in Budapest, Hungary. It’s beamed into the UK via a very dubious company which also makes pornographic videos for the eastern European market.

If that’s true it is very strange. I always thought that those programmes looked particularly weird…