ITV's Deloitte audit into premium rate interactive services - also known as the "bloodbath" - has been a long time in gestation. It was March when this one first kicked off and a long seven and a half months of "I can't comment on that until the report has been published" for ITV, while other broadcasters bore the brunt of the shock that these casual deceptions have caused.
So with the benefit of us all having worn ourselves out on Cookie the Cat and Richard & Judy, ITV chairman Michael Grade will doubtless be hoping that following the sacking of Peter Fincham earlier this month no one will have the stomach to call for further heads. You can imagine them yesterday, holed up in ITV towers. "Don't worry, lads, we can tough this one out. Never mind the zero tolerance thing - that was just a 100 day headline. No one needs to lose their jobs over this".
Let's just have a quick romp through some of the highlights of this shameful list. Please, while we're running through, don't forget the British Comedy Awards - viewers allegedly encouraged to vote after the winner was chosen - which has been "dealt with separately". It's all in the detail here.
Soapstar Superstar was a programme whose central conceit was the "you decide" vote on who stays or goes. It was rigged. The wrong soap stars were put forward for the vote and then wrongly evicted. We can only conclude that like an election in some corrupt dictatorship, the people chose wrong. Stupid public.
Then on the second phone-in element, the opportunity for viewers to choose the songs the participants sing, one in five times their choice was ignored.
Deliberately and on "editorial" grounds. Put another way, rather like the editor of Blue Peter, somebody repeatedly offered viewers a choice and then decided they knew better.
They never had any intention of going with the viewers' votes unless, fortuitously, it happened to coincide with a number of editorial factors such as what the soap star could actually sing. Or what the producer fancied.
That entire series was a concoction. Fine - it's basically Celebrity Stars In Their Eyes anyway. So why take a show based on making soap stars look talented and good and introduce "interactive" elements? Only to extract money from viewers under false pretences. Everyone connected with this show ought to hang their heads in shame. Not venal? Well frankly it'd better be venal, because otherwise it's just perverse.
Now we turn to Ant and Dec. Let's be clear - I'm a big fan. Such a fan, in fact, that when they launched Saturday Night Takeaway I commissioned myself to interview them about their roles as both presenters and executive producers on the series.
They were very clear that they were involved in the details of their formats and not merely presenting. So when we see today that Takeaway's recurring element "Jiggy Bank", in which a viewer enters a competition to win up to £5,000 in cash has been corrupted from the start, they've got a huge problem, even if their claims not to know what was going on are true. Jiggy Bank contestants were always limited to entrants who happen to live within an hour of a pre-determined location and "routinely" were editorially selected, including one time when they picked someone they knew and another when it was "the most entertaining" individual.
Grab the Ads and Win the Ads, the other two competitions in the show, were run with an essentially criminal sloppiness. Solicits for people to enter one competition were made when they had no chance of being selected - the Richard & Judy problem - and, in addition, the studio audience, which you pay - through a competition - to be part of, was routinely selected by the production team.
Essentially these two shows, which were two of ITV's biggest programme brands, run in primetime and - one would hope - with the full attention of senior executives in both ITV Productions and ITV Network, are just like ITV Play. And yes, there are other shows in this report; it certainly isn't brief.
They have deliberately extracted cash from trusting members of the audience on the basis of wide-eyed appeals from some of their favourite household names. Having extracted millions, they don't even do the courtesy of entering them in the draw. Or listening to their opinions.
Genuinely, we should be furious. There's an inevitable cynicism creeping in here, which ITV has rather deliberately tried to exploit. Think about some things: these are not programmes supplied by independent producers; they are blue chip ITV in -house brands. These are not compliance errors that can be ascribed to a breakdown in communication between a phone line operator and a production company. They're not even accidental miscounting of votes or keeping open phone lines long after a count has been made - all of which are here in this report, I'm just inured to them like you are. It's not even the "gee-ing up" minor offence that is widespread and not included here either of telling the audience "it's really close, vote now" when it's not.
This is deliberate, it's routine and it's editorial. It's at the heart of these programmes. These are formats devised around deception and a deception that runs through the core of ITV's entertainment output, which is the core of its schedule.
Michael Grade can go on every bulletin today and say that it isn't corrupt but why on earth would we ever believe him again either? Zero tolerance, Michael? It's not good enough.
