Question mark over future of TV phone-ins ENTERTAINMENT: SCANDAL

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Mar 11, 2007 | by Steven Vass

THESE are ugly times for TV phone-ins. After an extraordinary few weeks of errors and possible frauds that have seen all four major terrestrial broadcasters in the dock, industry leaders were rounded up for a crisis meeting with premium rate regulator Icstis last Thursday.

As Icstis announced a range of new measures to restore consumer confidence, the question on every nervous pair of lips was whether anyone else would be exposed in the days ahead.

The Richard And Judy show was first in the firing line three weeks ago when murky allegations emerged over its You Say We Pay quiz. Reportedly without the knowledge of presenters Richard Madeley or Judy Finnegan, viewers were being asked to call to take part long after the day's contestants had been chosen.

Madeley was quoted as saying he was "f***ing furious" and the quiz was suspended while Channel 4 launched an independent investigation. In what must have cost a small fortune, it made a charitable donation and offered refunds to callers over the past two series.

Over on BBC1, there was a stench coming from Saturday Kitchen. The BBC was forced to admit that the cookery show was not always live after Eammon Holmes was shown facing a viewer vote over which pudding he would eat at the same time as he was presenting a radio show on Radio Five Live.

While the BBC confirmed it had filmed two possible endings, it also emerged that the TV chefs were not really answering live cookery questions and that viewers could not really phone to take part in the following week's show because it was being filmed the same day.

Not to be outdone, ITV revealed that mistakes on The X-Factor meant that 1.3 million voters pushing Sky red buttons had paid 50p instead of 35p, doing them out of a total of nearly GBP200,000.

Barely before anyone could announce another round of refunds and donations, attention turned to Ant And Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway, whose Grab The Ads contest was reportedly up to the same tricks as You Say We Pay.

ITV responded by launching a full independent inquiry into the past two years' worth of phone-in programmes, temporarily suspending all such competitions and taking quiz channel ITV Play off air.

Everything from Loose Women to I'm A Celebrity - is being reviewed, and auditor Deloitte worked frantically all week to ensure that Dancing On Ice could air yesterday. (Since the inquiry involves only ITV plc, however, no STV shows are being investigated. ) Some sources suggested that this response from ITV was the clearest sign yet that a new era under Michael Grade had begun, saying it would be hard to imagine such swift action under former chief executive Charles Allen.

Late last week it then emerged that there were problems with Five's quiz show, Brainteaser, even though the channel had given its programmes a clean bill of health only the day before.

As recently as last Thursday the show was putting up the names of viewers who had given the correct answer to a phone-in question when nobody had the answer right.

Five followed ITV's lead and announced a full independent investigation and suspended late-night broadcasts of quiz channel Quiz Call.

So far the BBC and Channel 4 have not followed suit. After promising that Saturday Kitchen would always be live in future, the BBC is saying that an internal check revealed nothing else to worry about. And Channel 4 has refused either to make its review retrospective or suspend anything else in the meantime.

All the same, Icstis is investigating each of the offending shows. When it completes this in the next two or three months, it could levy fines of up to GBP250,000 in each case. It would probably fall to the phone companies and not the broadcasters to pay them, but anyone associated with findings of guilt will see their reputations damaged.

There are nevertheless those who believe Icstis has not gone far enough.

Despite the investigations and announcements of systematic regular checks and a kitemark system, some argue it should have announced an industry-wide investigation.

While few would argue that different situations have been lumped together the errors on X-Factor are clearly not in the same category as some of the others, for example there are suggestions that shady practices go further than the alleged ones in the public eye.

"They are rife, " says one senior source in the interactive phone services industry. "The major media companies have squeezed the service providers to get them to provide these services as cheaply as possible. And since they're often not being paid other than through a share of the revenues, it's very tempting to let the calls keep running after the cut-off point." The source says that as service provision has become more competitive and the broadcasters have sought better and better deals, margins for the providers have plummeted. If they were regularly enjoying margins of 30-per cent to 50-per cent when the industry started 20 years ago, they are now lucky to see more than 5-per cent. "This has caused the level of professionalism to diminish, " the source says. In times of advertising recession, such as the one that has dogged television in recent months, margins are squeezed even tighter.