Better shape up... stop charging me too much to vote on Grease is the Word. Photograph: PA
Dodgy phonelines have been all over the news recently, but this week's tougher guidelines from Icstis will do nothing to stop some channels mugging their viewers and getting away with it.
Why exactly does voting for Grease is the Word cost twice as much as voting for Any Dream Will Do? Seems like the same premise to me - one number, one act, easily wrapped up in a five-second phone message. So why are ITV viewers paying 50p compared with the BBC's 25p (which includes 12p for charity)?
It's hard to imagine Tesco or Ford daring to charge their customers up to 400% more than their rivals, but ITV and Channel 4 have been doing it for years. So it costs £1 to enter an easy multiple-choice quiz on This Morning or Paul O'Grady, but only 25p to do the same thing on BBC Snooker or Eggheads. Admittedly, there are bigger prizes on offer (on Tuesday, O'Grady promised £5,000). But when did paying for them become the viewer's responsibility, or £1 become a fair price compared with, say, a lottery ticket?
Perhaps Tuesday's announcement of a 70% fall in Channel 4 profits goes some way to explaining it. ITV, meanwhile, started scrambling for cash long ago, plumbing the depths of ITV Glitterball and bombarding viewers of ITV2 to 4 with late night ads promising "hundreds of single girls waiting for your call!" This bit might at least be true - at these prices, any girl still on the line must be too poor to go out anyway.
This reluctance to stop viewers being overcharged is underlined by a lack of editorial control. At the Beeb, phonelines are governed by the much resented editorial guidelines that stipulate "We should normally ensure that premium rate calls are priced at the lowest tariff. They should not normally be used to generate a profit with the exception of BBC charity appeals." Admittedly, this draws attention away from the profits the Beeb does make from phonelines (along with a nice slice for everyone from BT to Icstis). However, their votes and competitions are consistently cheaper. Over at Channel 4 or ITV there's no such guidance: individual programmes decide how much to charge. On current evidence this seems to mean as much as they can get away with.
Then again, perhaps the viewers are making their own decisions. For my money, Grease is a stronger show all round than Any Dream Will Do. Male/female couples have a broader appeal than the drippy Joseph parade and the judges are more desperate for attention. Yet it was still beaten by 2 million viewers last Saturday. Perhaps audiences have worked out how much extra they will be charged over the course of the series for choosing ITV.
Either Andrew Lloyd Webber has suddenly got more attractive or market forces and public mistrust are combining in ways the schedulers never imagined. I'm voting for the latter.
