Here we go again. For those of you who've got confused, this is part 94 in the ongoing debacle that is the TV premium rate phonelines scandal but try to stay awake because this one's a humdinger.
Richard & Judy's innocuous seeming competition You Say We Pay - the one where the viewer described an elephant and Richard or Judy had to guess that there's actually a picture of an aardvark on the screen - had been running since 2001. In 2004, Eckoh, a premium rate service provider that also runs all of ITV's call TV services, took it over and began running the competition.
Turns out that between October 2004 and February 2007, when the competition was yanked off the air following a story in the Mail on Sunday - never to return, we now know - roughly 5 million viewers rang up at a cost of £1 a shot to enter. We don't know exactly how many of them were fleeced; suffice it to say that Icstis tells us that in two and a half week's monitoring earlier this year they discovered 47% of those entries didn't stand a chance of getting on air.
It is, even given all that has gone before, truly shocking. Alistair Graham, chairman of Icstis and a man not often faced with this kind of regulation, describes this misleading of viewers as a "reckless disregard".
Channel 4's own investigation into this disgraceful episode is not yet complete. I asked them this morning why it's taking so long to find out exactly who at Cactus, the production company, Eckoh, the service provider and Channel 4, the broadcaster, might have been complicit in this ongoing deception, but a spokesman said it was a complex investigation and was still ongoing, six months after the competition has ended.
Still, we don't really need to know exactly who was complicit and who was unknowing, because we know from the report into Celebrity Big Brother that Channel 4 habitually places phenomenal trust in its outside providers. The "don't ask, don't tell" policy operated on Big Brother that resulted in a junior researcher's failure to alert anyone to alleged racist incidents inside the house will doubtless also have been in place on the daily live show Richard & Judy.
Icstis has hit Eckoh with a £150,000 fine and now referred You Say We Pay to Ofcom, which will be able to spend some more time looking into Channel 4 and Cactus's possible culpability.
For a sense of what might happen we can look to Channel Five's recent run-in over Brainteaser, another instance of extraordinary contempt for viewers. Five was fined £300,000 for 16 instances of phone quiz fraud on Brainteaser, instances of fakery that the channel also stated it knew nothing about.
In that case Ofcom, rightly, said tough. If you didn't know, you ought to have done and you're responsible anyway so cough up. It remains to be seen if the regulator will view the You Say We Pay debacle in the same light as Five's fakery. Following on from the Big Brother fiasco, one would hope that the benefit of the doubt has by now been squandered.
But this is all detail and will largely be lost on viewers anyway. No one really cares who did what. All that matters is the circling cloud of suspicion covering everyone from Blue Peter to Big Brother, taking in Richard & Judy, The X Factor, GMTV and Dancing on Ice. I'm frequently accused by broadcasters of having no sense of proportion over these incidents. I'm told that I'm overstating the crisis in trust. So tell me: is it Michael Grade's culture of casual contempt? Is it reckless disregard? Or is it all just a horrible coincidence?
