Once every few years the premium rate call industry smells the whiff of a scandal, causing question to be asked about fairness and profit, and TV producers to check under their fingernails for dirt. Last night's Panorama was the first real evidence of a smoking gun in 20 years and the fallout has only just begun.
Before I go on, I should declare my involvement in most of the early telephone services of the BBC and Channel 4. To now hear - albeit exaggerated - claims of up to £13m a year being cheated out of GMTV viewers came as both a shock and a disappointment at the level of control broadcasters have leased out to inadequately supervised third parties. Apparently the GMTV provider, Opera, had been fined 21 times by Icstis - not that they mentioned this at the time or in its hasty response this morning.
Having been out of the industry for a decade, I can at least sleep easy over the worst perpetrators mentioned by the show. When ITV Play and Quiz Call first appeared, I sat goggle-eyed that such blatant cons had been allowed on air, let alone bearing the brand of a major broadcaster. Tighter regulation was promised last month, but the only sign of change when I tuned in recently was the hostess urging callers "to ration their calls ... say no more than 10 a night" - thus milking them out of £7.50 rather than the original 75p. All the same, it was a bit rich of Greg Dyke to mouth off about "stealing from the poor" - a man on whose watch (and indeed mine) hundreds of "what is the capital of France?" quizzes snuck out under the BBC banner.
However, in my eight years in the industry, I was not aware of a single intentional fraud against viewers. Mistakes, yes - from servers falling over in the middle of a vote to lines not opening or incorrect messages playing - but these were largely technical faults that were corrected or announced where possible. And in those days, such competitions and votes were packed far less tightly in the schedules and not relentlessly plugged by the presenters as they are today. Back then, true interaction was restricted to one major televote per week, with BT blocking up to half the calls (at no cost to the caller) to stop the network crashing. One million votes was considered a landmark - now they get 12 times that between X-Factor and Strictly Come Dancing on finals night alone, justifying our conviction that televoting would one day transform the broadcasting landscape. If Panorama has destroyed that trust, then shoddy operators and complicit producers will have castrated more than one golden goose.
The BBC deserves real credit for taking this subject on, not least as it tackled a few of its own skeletons. However Ofcom and the toothless Icstis now react, broadcasters have to decide for themselves whether they want the power of viewer interaction or just the revenue. They can't have both.
