Thanks to our friend David Howell from England for writing this article on the recent phone game scandal in England. If you’d like more news about it or to see him and others analyze Deal or No Deal daily, please go to the wonderful site Bother’s Bar. I’d like to apologize to the people who use our LiveJournal feed, as this is a bit long, but it’s extremely interesting and well worth the read. Please leave your comments if you care to and tell David what you think of this issue.

The surge of phone-in ‘participation TV’ games in the US in the last year was perhaps entirely unsurprising, as the UK has seen a similar and stronger trend for at least the last two years. Indeed, at least a couple of the PlayMania clones claimed to be ‘based on a British format’, and of course PlayMania itself utilised a British host (Mel Peachey) from the start. (Ironically, she is now in charge of 100 Winners, which deviates greatly from most UK call-in games.) This UK trend, in turn, originated from elsewhere in Europe.

Arguably, the UK arrival of the trend was with the Endemol format Brainteaser, which began in 2002 and had been used in various forms in several other countries. This involved a series of simple word games being played among two studio contestants, fused with a viewer phone-in (the revenue from which apparently funded all the show’s production costs, including the studio top prize of £3,000/$5,800).
With this model proven as profitable, the German channel 9 Live broadcast for four hours per weekday on Channel 4’s digital offshoot E4 in late 2004, and soon similar channels proliferated across digital satellite and cable. The tipping point was arguably in March 2006, when ITV - easily the UK’s biggest commercial network - introduced 24/7 phone-in channel ITV Play; they had already started devoting several hours of late-night broadcasting to their own phone-in shows, but ITV Play was broadcast 24/7 on all digital services including the digital terrestrial service Freeview - which broadcasts to nine million households and had no other 24/7 phone-in channels, unlike other digital services on satellite and cable which already had a proliferation of them. This advantage, coupled with massive prizes - including at least one win of over £108,000 ($200,000) - ensured ITV Play were able to dominate the market, making profits of around £2m ($3.9m) every month, a huge boost for an otherwise-struggling ITV.

The key problem with these shows in the UK was the regulation or lack thereof. Many questions were astonishingly easy, luring low-educated and low-income contestants in. Many more were astonishingly deceptive, an infamous example being variations on the theme ‘add the numbers’ where viewers were asked to add up the numbers on a written list (typically a shopping list) but with twists such as counting numbers within words and even Roman numerals. Other notorious questions involved completing open-ended lists such as ‘things you would find in a woman’s handbag’ - often with highly dubious answers. The ITV Play show Quizmania may have been killed off when it included this ‘handbag’ question with answers including ‘rawlplugs’. The official line was that a popular TV chef had mentioned on a message board that she carries rawlplugs in her handbag. The show, which held a cult following not dissimilar to that held now in the US by PlayMania, was cancelled days after ITV Play were fined for the ‘one-off’ incident.

At the same time, there was a notable increase in the number of viewer competitions tied into most game shows and talk shows. Generally, these came in the form of a screamingly easy question, typically resembling an opening question on Millionaire (complete with comedy wrong answers). These generally required phoning a premium-rate number, usually with a cost of around 60p (just over $1). More recently, viewer competitions have removed even this trivial skill element, as first seen on Deal or No Deal in late 2005. A free web entry is provided on all of these skill-free competitions to prevent them falling under lottery regulations, but this free route is not always provided where there is an element of skill, even the most marginal and disputable.

This drew the attention of regulator Ofcom in 2006, with certain talk shows in particular being chastised for offering phone-in competitions with extremely simple questions and no free web entry, and a review of appropriate regulations was still ongoing when new revelations emerged in the last month, largely though not entirely unrelated.

The first came in mid-February. A Sunday newspaper claimed that phone service provider Eckoh chose the winner of the phone-in competition on the Channel 4 talk show Richard and Judy within ten minutes of the show starting, only for the competition to be plugged at several points after this. Thus, participants phoned in - paying £1 (almost $2) to do so - with no chance of winning. The competition was quickly pulled, ironically before the article was even released, and the hosts apologised on-air for a situation they said they were unaware of. While Channel 4 claim to have attempted to act ‘fairly and transparently’, the accounts director of Eckoh allegedly sent an email to senior figures at both Channel 4 and producers Cactus TV in September 2004 with no reply.

That was just the start. Investigations begun into no fewer than three more ITV shows with phone-in elements, including the Idol spinoff The X-Factor where it was alleged 1.3m ‘red button’ votes using digital remote controls were overcharged. The BBC became an unlikely victim of the scandal when cookery show Saturday Kitchen asked viewers to phone in for the chance to appear on the next episode, in spite of the fact it was recorded immediately afterwards (it usually airs live); this, too, was produced by Cactus TV with phone services provided by Eckoh.

A new urgency was given to the issue by premium rate phone line watchdog ICSTIS, who held an urgent meeting with broadcasters and producers yesterday; a new licensing scheme is being planned, probably for introduction in early summer; Brainteaser was singled out for using production staff as fake winners when no real ones existed, and its broadcaster Five cancelled both it and all other phone-ins today.

But between that meeting being called and it taking place, a bombshell was dropped. On Monday, ITV abandoned every single phone-in competition it ran - ITV Play was taken off air, phone-ins on talk shows This Morning and Loose Women were scrapped, and even the semi-final of celebrity ice-skating competition Dancing On Ice was under threat until this morning, less than 48 hours before transmission.

From what I can discern, the blame for problems on terrestrial television shows lies primarily with the producers - in many cases, the broadcasters seem unaware of the true situation, or at least claim to be. But if the Richard and Judy scandal is any guide, there is a significant amount of buck-passing going on, and no side comes out with any credit. If the US is heading the same way with its phone-ins - and it seems to be, with such tricks as Family Feud’s ‘Fast Cash‘ offering no clear correct answer and Midnight Money Madness closing down for phone-in problems but not for web entry problems - a huge can of worms could and should be opened.