Bulletin Bored – The Monthly Response to Ofcom’s Broadcasting Bulletin
By Kirsty Walker

Ofcom Sanction ITV

Ofcom, the standards watchdog for broadcasters, has issued ITV with a whopping £5.6 million fine for breaching fairness rules over its premium rate phone contests.

Phew, it’s been a toughy for the first ever Bulletin Bored, where we attempt to untangle the UK industry regulator’s monthly report and deliver the most juicy bits for your perusal. This month it’s the turn of the Premium Rate Services decision, which has led to an unusually high profile bulletin.

The chief culprit was Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway, which had three competitions; Jiggy Bank, Win The Ads and Grab The Ads, found to be breaking broadcast code.

The Code is quite sniffy when it comes to competitions. Above all Ofcom say that competition should be run fairly and all information on selection of contestants, rules and procedures should be supplied to those who are taking part. In the case of Jiggy Bank, the game where a contestant rides a giant coin-filled pig in an attempt to shake as much money as possible out of it, Ofcom considered that the production company ‘pre-selected’ the location of the pig and that this should have been revealed to the general public. This is perhaps the most specious of Ofcom’s rulings.

The Jiggy Bank and it’s associated rigging, camera setup and score board represent an area of roughly 20 metres square. This must be installed and tested before transmission, the pig itself worked on a hydraulic system which must be rigorously tested to prevent any earth-moving and instability. If the production team were to announce that the Jiggy Bank was in a particular location there would doubtless be hundreds of people showing up to catch a glimpse of the spectacle, which would require additional licensing, policing and security, at a cost to the tax payer. It’s hardly in the public interest to give full details of the location of the game, and the fact that the locations have to recce’d and organised prior to transmission should not have been documented as failures on behalf of the production team.

Secondly, Ofcom state two counts of contravening rules on ‘random selection’, having found that production staff chose contestants on their suitability for appearance on television rather than in a random way. This is rather niggly as it is common practice to select competition winners in this manner and Ofcom knows it. If they were to intervene on every broadcast which gave the prizes to the one who screamed the most they would have little time for anything else. Granted there should not be ‘casting’ of winners when there is skill or knowledge involved, for example by setting quiz contestants easier questions, but when random selection is truly applied it does not make for very good television, and that’s what ITV are making after all. A real random selection of on screen contestants does not take into account any issues of ease of watch for viewers, nor the ability of members of the public to ‘perform’ on screen, which may involve physical exertion, improvisation and the confidence to speak on air without swearing/defaming/calling for an overthrow of the monarchy.

It is when we reach the realms of Grab the Ads and Win The Ads that ITV really come unstuck. In these cases, calls really were vetted and people were selected based on their reaction and personality, which was not in any way random. With telephone calls this is less forgivable as the likelihood is that any winning contestant will be excited and talkative, it’s not necessary that they squeal like a banshee upon being told they’ve won some toothpaste. Worse still, winners were being selected well before lines were closed, meaning that those who called after this point were wasting their money and had no chance of success. £3 million for you then, ITV.

Ant and Dec make their second appearance on the naughty step with Gameshow Marathon, where a competition called Prize Mountain had contestants selected by suitability to be on screen, and there was no indication whether text entries to the show had even been counted. That’ll be another £1.2 million thankyou.

McPartlin and Donnelly (doesn’t that make them sound much more sinister? Almost like Burke and Hare), claim absolutely no knowledge of these transgressions, which is either a lie or an indictment of the trend of making your front persons into Executive Producers because they once turned up to a meeting and said “Haway the lads, howaboot a massive pig, like?” Ignorance is not supposed to be an excuse, but the lack of fallout where Ant and Dec are concerned shows that Ofcom still believe it is.

Another £1.2 million comes from the coffers of Soapstar Superstar, the risible celebrity ‘talent’ show which goaded viewers into phoning in and voting for their winner, as they do in every other ITV programme, from The X Factor to ITN coverage of the Zimbabwean elections. The fine was levied for overriding the results of phone polls and closing entries to phone polls without announcements.

The final fine was a piddling £275,000 to ITV 2 for failing to state clearly that voting lines were closed during its plus one service for various programmes. An elementary mistake which more than the other rules breaks shows the contempt with which viewers were treated.

We are in the age of interactivity, and viewers expect to become stakeholders and decision makers in certain types of programmes, those with a competition element or those whereby the outcome of a show is decided by viewers based on what they see. Whether this expectation is battered by the Big Brother Story Editors who actively design character arcs for the housemates, or the editing of shows such I’m A Celebrity where popularity and stoic ness is so important, is another question entirely. But the very simple failure of a production team to ensure that viewers are not spending money on closed phone lines or voting on a decision that will be changed later anyway is down to arrogance. Runners and researchers can be dismissive of the viewing public, this I know because I’ve worked among them. Many of them see viewers as something that must be tolerated in order to make television and it does not surprise me in the slightest that some jumped up teamer decided that he or she knew better than 70 percent of the viewing public and disregarded their votes in favour of Richard Bloody Fleeshman singing a Boyzone song instead of a Take That song.

The Bulletin goes on to chastise the mind-numbingly stupid late night quiz shows such as Glitterball and The Mint. These are the shows which attract drunks, insomniacs and the criminally insane to name a random quantum physicist or Maltese Member of Parliament for the chance to win rather disappointing amounts of money. Needless to say each call costs about £35 and you get charged whether you get through, get disconnected, get an engaged signal or the wind changes direction. Thus people call over and over until they get through to the vacuous marionette on the screen, who then tells them that no, fishcake is not an animal, and doesn’t contain the Bonus Letters Q and J, so could they please call back and try again because the producers want speedboats for the weekend. The same hijinks as normal then, nothing new on that front but the fact that the normally centre stage idiocy of the premium rate late night games are relegated to a footnote because the primetime boys are just as shoddy.

That it has taken this long to unravel the complexities of the premium rate debacle is not surprising. The fines aren’t that surprising, or that effective either. And it seems that the public are still trusting ITV. What has changed then? Virtually nothing, though it’s nice to see some sort of insight into the ravages of the gallery, where viewers are out of sight and out of mind, and where the general public are viewed with little more than suspicion and contempt for the most part.

Elsewhere in the bulletin….

Leona Lewis won The X Factor by over 2.7 million votes, which serves to let the programme off the hook for mistakes with their phone lines, and makes Raymond Quinn look like an even bigger loser.

There is no evidence that The X Factor fixed the battle between Leon (Who?) Jackson and Rhydian Roberts. There is strong evidence from these quarters that Rhydian Roberts is the product of a union between Mr Spock and Kate Bush.