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24-04-2007

Birmingham-based Opera Interactive Technology “starred” in Panorama’s expose of an alleged £40million TV quiz show scandal last night. Pete Millington asks a premium rate question of his own - how much responsibility should the viewers take?

Last night Panorama, the world’s longest running investigative TV show has broken the final rule of undercover journalism…and ditched the dirt on some of it’s own

No one was spared, from Richard and Judy’s “You Pay We Holiday in the Bahamas” premium rate quiz competition to Blue Peter’s “oh b*llocks the phone lines are down, someone quickly make a kid out of sticky backed plastic, a washing-up bottle and a ping-pong ball and give him the crap prize” scam

Biddy will be turning in her dog basket when she gets wind of this lot!

And of course she’d have never carried out stunts like this to try and hoodwink the nation’s babes and kiddiewinks in her day would she? Not ‘alf Biddy! Like swapping the stiff pedigree Alsation pup for a mongrel mutt purchased from a tinker up the Old Kent Road ten minutes before the live Christmas show went out on air?

It’s no wonder they claim that Chris Trace was the man who actually coined the phrase “and now for something completely different” ten years before Monty Python… so it wasn’t a segue between dolls houses and train sets after all!

“..and now boys and girls, Valerie and I will unwrap our new pedigree Alsation pooch… agggh! What the…? Call this a…. Ms Baxter I want words with you after this show has ended”

Anyway…. Who am I? Ah yes… Panorama…

Shows such as Saturday Kitchen and X-Factor were also under scrutiny as the long spool of shame was unravelled before the nation’s shocked little square shaped eyes

(I’m just relieved that my four year old had just nodded off on the sofa after her six hour after-school dose of television, I don’t know how I would have even begun to explain all this! You don’t like them to become cynical and disillusioned too young in life - she might start thinking that Miss Hooley doesn’t really exist and it’s just an arty-farty actress who earns lots of money and hates anyone under 21)

Not wishing to take the heat off all those greedy little so and so’s at places like GMTV, BBC, ITV, Channels 4,5, 6, 11, 63, 74, (Tony’s Den number 10, did I hear someone call “House”?)

… I blame Sky for this slide into depravity and gambling anyway… thank God for nice old Mr Branston, our very own St George in a kaftan

… but it was interesting to hear the testimonies of some of the poor victims who have only just discovered that they have been throwing their hard-earned money at these TV crooks (not cooks) for the past 10 or so years…

The expression “Erm… HELLO!” comes to mind once again

OK we’ve all done it just the once. We knew we were being done at the time though didn’t we…? That late night quiz where the cheesy bloke was asking his producer “where are all the callers? Isn’t anyone calling in to win this 50 grand in crisp bank notes I am holding just here in my lily white presenter’s hand?”

You knew it was a con all along… but like Oscar Wilde once said “I can resist everything except temptation” (or was it Harpo Marx in whistles and sign language? I don’t have my dictionary of quotations to hand, good job it’s not a quiz really isn’t it or I’d be in a right pickle)

But as I was saying, we’ve all been there, that innocent little call and you know what they say: “a moment in the call queue, a lifetime on the overdraft”

All I was trying to do was vote Jade Goody out and now I’m paying off a re-mortgage and a 15 year bank loan

Yes we’ve all done it once, but not two hundred times in one evening! Some of these good folk were running up phone bills of thousands of pounds a week. They could have just written themselves the ruddy prize cheque in the first place and saved themselves a stiff right elbow and an ear infection. I mean… Come on guys, you have to take some responsibility for your own stupidity surely?

These are obviously the same group of people who pay for tabloid newspapers everyday. There has to be some relationship. It would be too scary to find out there are two separate huge groups of daft people walking about.

And they look so normal! It could be you or I … in some moment of madness or compulsive greed?

So no, someone has to be held to account, it’s a clear case of fraud, the barristers said so and some little oik of a technician will have to walk

So well done to Panorama for daring to leave a festering pile of doo-doo on the front entrance steps of the BBC

And fair play to the director whose idea it was to break into the Blue Peter garden to film a bit of the programme…a close up shot of someone timidly turning over a few handfuls of flower bed compost (note however, they weren’t quite so irreverent to dig up Petra for this one -the softie BBC wimps!)

Percy Thrower would be turning in his sunken garden over this kafuffle

And as the Panorama ‘expose of the Millennium’ reached it’s climactic finale (you know .. that bit right at the end where that very serious “we’ve nailed you, you little toe rags” theme music starts up…

Or perhaps the “and if we haven’t actually nailed you on the programme, then you can be damned sure that that car door you just heard slamming outside in the street is a van load of rozzers” theme music)

…just before all that… Jeremy Vine appears with a serious expression to drive home the final nail in the coffin of exploitative participatory TV…

“So has Panorama got it right? Have viewers been ripped off to the tune of millions of pounds a year for the past decade, whilst the fat cats at the BBC and ITV rake it in through fixed quiz shows where a false winner is selected just moments after the phone-in has started?”

Vine’s over-sincere grimace turns to a cheesy grin…

“Or are you lot out there really as stupid as we intellectually superior folk in the media have you down as being? No… you decide… if you think TV bosses are thieves then phone our premium rate number coming up now at the bottom of your screen…but if it’s you that’s as thick as Richard and Judy on cheap sherry... then change that last digit to a two…”

Cue the “and now someone is about to get seriously banged up” music and roll the titles…

But don’t forget the premium rate phone numbers… lingering teasingly for just a second or two longer…

Lines are open till midnight…(even if the night-watch man was invited to pick the winner from an empty fried chicken box as he came on duty three hours ago)

Mmmmmmm…. go on, you know you want to.