The BBC executive board gathered for its regular meeting last Tuesday morning for coffee, biscuits and meltdown. The previous evening, at 5pm, the deadline had passed for producers to come forward confessing, in a spirit of openness and honesty, to programmes they had made that had misled the public in some way.

 

They, and other BBC chiefs, were giving staff a chance to come clean after revelations that a trailer for a programme about the Queen had been less than truthful with viewers, and that the corporation had also been fined £50,000 for faking a Blue Peter competition

 

Much to the apparent surprise of Bennett and Abramsky, two experienced and highly respected corporation bureaucrats, a procession of contrite and nervous producers came forward to ’fess up. The public, it seemed, had been deceived with unnerving consistency, particularly over programmes with phone-in polls and competitions. And on the corporation’s most noble flagship enterprises, too. Comic Relief and Children in Need, for example.

 

“We just sat there absolutely stunned,” one executive board member told me, “shocked beyond belief. Nobody had any idea that this was going on on such a scale.”

 

“Why are we doing these phone-in polls?” said the executive board member. “In what possible sense are they public service broadcasting?

 

“The programme makers tell you that it’s an invaluable way of reaching the difficult-to-get C2D audience. But we need to reach them in different, cleverer ways

 

“The BBC has always been very good at reaching middle-class, Old Etonian audiences; in fact it has whole channels just for them. But it doesn’t know how to attract the white working class, because nobody from the white working class works for it. Phone-in polls are an easy and unacceptable answer. They’ve been suspended now; there’s absolutely no reason why they should ever start again.”

According to Roger Graef, a leading independent producer, the scams and manipulations have been threatening to erupt for some time.

 

A senior BBC journalist put it even more bluntly. “The BBC has to stop trying to get in the f****** gutter with all the other tawdry channels. When you start chasing ratings and using the foul marketing language of City spivs, it’s inevitable what will happen.” AH, but the trouble is, if the BBC doesn’t get into the gutter it may lose its raison d’être anyway. For the past 60 years or so the BBC has managed to straddle two poles – universality and public service – and thus justify the licence fee. But it is finding it increasingly difficult to do so.

 

 

Never before has the BBC been forced to admit so many mistakes. In the past fortnight it has revealed that production staff fixed phone-in competitions on Children in Need, Comic Relief, Sport Relief, a children’s television programme called TMi, the Liz Kershaw Show on BBC 6 Music and on White Label, a pop music show on the World Service.

 

In each case, BBC staff had posed as winners or had announced a fictitious winner following technical problems with phone lines.

 

— The Liz Kershaw Show, which was presented as live, had a competition in which listeners appeared to win prizes. However, the BBC admitted: “There were no competitions or prizes and all the callers were actually members of the production team and their friends.”

— The Treasury has complained about a recent Newsnight report in which scenes were manipulated to make it appear as if Gordon Brown’s press officer was deliberately picking on a reporter.

— This weekend the BBC revealed that it had misled viewers in a wildlife documentary called Incredible Animal Journeys broadcast in May. The programme claimed to show Steve Leonard, the presenter, tracking the migration of a pregnant caribou via a GPS receiver from a hotel room in the Yukon. In fact, the scenes were “reconstructed” several weeks later in the UK.

The broadcaster was only rumbled after an eagle-eyed viewer spotted a British electrical socket in the background.

 

 

 

— The Beeb is far from the only broadcaster to mislead viewers.

 

 

Channel 4 broadcast a quiz on Richard & Judy that enticed viewers to enter, even though a shortlist of winners had already been drawn up. Eckoh, the company that ran the phone lines, has been fined £150,000 and Channel 4 could face a similar penalty.

— Five was recently fined £300,000 for broadcasting Brainteaser, a lunchtime quiz in which production staff stood in for real winners on several occasions. The channel also admitted on Friday that some scenes from its Killer Shark Live series were not live, but prerecorded. The show, like Brainteaser, was made by Endemol, the creator of Big Brother.

— Nor has ITV gone unscathed. GMTV is alleged to have defrauded viewers of up to £10m over four years by accepting calls, via premium rate lines, on its morning quiz after winners had already been chosen.

Concerns have been raised about other ITV shows including Dancing on Ice and The X Factor, prompting Michael Grade, ITV’s executive chairman, to halt all premium line phone-ins temporarily and to instigate a review.

— If it is any consolation to British audiences, some foreign broadcasters have perpetrated far worse frauds. Last year at least two Mexican stations broadcast “live” reports of a dawn raid to rescue three kidnap victims. It later turned out that the raids had been staged for TV audiences hours after the real police operation had been carried out.

 

source: Sunday Times

The whole phone in thing needs to be investigated by Scotland Yard and charges of fraud bought against those responsible