Richard and Judy were first, claiming blissful ignorance when their Channel 4 show was caught making money from callers who would never make it to air.

Jo Wiley was equally unaware when a ‘competition winner’ on her show turned out to be a member of staff, despite the segment in question being pre-recorded.

And now Ant and Dec claim no knowledge of the fact that callers to their Saturday Night Takeaway were charged money to enter competitions and then discarded if they weren’t sufficiently photogenic or living in the right part of the country. Yet they are executive producers of the show.

These celebrities – and more – all claim to be innocent in the premium rate phone scandal plaguing British broadcasting, and we have no reason to disbelieve them. But the fact remains that they should have known what was going on. They aren’t just hired voices, but the interface between ourselves and the workings of the show.

Like a newspaper editor, they are the public faces of their programmes and should be the first to go at the end of any inquiry. Not for being complicit in any wrongdoing, but for precisely the opposite: being ignorant of misdemeanours carried on all around them.

Yet the networks have an interest in overlooking this fact, only too aware that it’s those famous faces and voices that pull in the crowds.

We’ll force out a back-room boy instead, shall we? He’ll not be missed, and then we can say we’ve done our bit.

After months of the BBC’s minor misdemeanours being plastered all over the papers, they have been put into sharp relief by lurid stories of far more serious goings-on at ITV.

The independent broadcaster, it seems, made £7.8 million from over 8 million viewers by claiming to have entered them into premium-rate competitions they had no chance of winning.

Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, ITV chief Michael Grade described the findings, contained in an independent, commissioned report, as a ’serious cultural failure’. He’s right, but it will be interesting to see what happens next.

Heads rolled at the BBC for no more serious a crime than having viewers believe it was a caller, and not a handy passing child that won the competition to name the new Blue Peter cat. All competitions on all BBC services were scrapped the moment the story broke, and the Corporation went through a very public airing of its dirty washing as it investigated the facts and fired programme makers for the most minor indiscretions.

How different is the story from ITV. Grade who, let us not forget, used to run the BBC, wouldn’t commit to any dismissals and said only that if he’d been in charge at the time he himself would be resigning right now. He claimed that in cheating the viewers this way the channels had not been out to make more money, but to cut corners in providing better programmes, conveniently forgetting that better programmes mean more viewers, and more viewers mean more money.

But at the end of the day these competitions are about making money, whether on the BBC, ITV, or one of the myriad satellite channels. If they weren’t, they’d be run on a freefone basis, or at least charged at local rate.

ITV will now be refunding those cheated callers, much like GMTV before it, but there’s no word on whether it will follow the BBC’s lead and suspend phone-based competitions for the foreseeable future.

That, sadly, shows the difference between our two leading national broadcasters, and illustrates once again why the BBC is the rightful recipient of the national TV tax, the license fee. Let’s remember this next time it’s due for review, and the independent channels start once again to call for a share of that revenue.

GMTV was shocked and saddened to discover that between January 2003 and April 2007, some of our competition procedures were not carried out correctly. We found out that staff at Opera Telecom had been selecting finalists before the competition lines had closed. This meant that not everyone who entered had a fair chance of winning. (Source: GMTV press release)

I love the language in this quote. Shocked and saddened.

Shocked and saddened isn’t the kind of language you use when you find out some viewers may have been defrauded 25p in a premium rate phone-in competition. It’s the kind of language you use when a princess is killed in a Parisian underpass, an American president decides to overthrow an oil-rich dictatorship, or people in Gloucestershire get flooded out of their homes and then run out of clean drinking water.

It’s also the kind of language you use when you can’t quite believe the furore being kicked up over something so small. The kind of language you use when you realise the only reason broadcasters are committing hari kiri over the competitions scandal is that they want to appear more penitent than competing stations. The kind of language you use when you find out you’ve been found out. Oops.

Ofcom is almost certain to fine GMTV heavily, but the station is trying to minimise the fallout by not only waving off its managing director, who resigned this morning, but also running a series of draws for the unsuccessful entrants into its earlier competitions. That’s on top of a complex set of refunds, outlined in a claim form:

If you entered the main daily competition on GMTV: We will refund £1.30 for every phone entry, £1.10 for every text entry and £1 for every web entry.

If you entered the bonus competitions after playing the main competition: We will refund an additional 60 pence for every phone entry, 60 pence for every text entry and 50 pence for every web entry.

If you entered the GMTV2 competition: We will refund 25 pence for every phone entry and 35 pence for every text entry.

If that’s not complicated enough, it seems GMTV’s record-keeping is incomplete, and it’s missing details for a whole range of calls made between August 2003 and September 2004, so needs claimants to submit itemised phone bills proving their right to a refund.

The administration costs alone are going to be astronomical.

Let’s hope they don’t impact on the size of the donation it plans on making to ChildLine, which while the BBC puts at £250,000, GMTV merely calls ’substantial’.

It seems the BBC’s competitions and editing debacle is either more extensive or more embarrassing than we thought, as Director General Mark Thompson has suspended all competitions on its broadcast services - both radio and TV.

I suppose it’s too much to hope this includes the Lottery.

Regardless of the true extent of the irregularities, which are said to have taken place during Comic Relief, Children in Need and Sports Relief among others, I am sure they are far from isolated incidents in the industry as a whole.

During my student days I worked on two series of an ITV gameshow that relied upon taking live callers to air to compete for a prize of up to £25,000.

There were several safeguards in place to make sure all ran smoothly, and there was (almost) always a winner. For starters, the whole randomness of the winner selection wasn’t entirely random at all. Ninety-six of us sat at the back of the studio taking calls and asking the callers to answer three questions. We’d then indicate whether they’d got one, two or three correct, by turning a switch on the desk.

This in turn would be fed into a computer, and someone on the show floor would look at their watch, work out how much more live airtime we had to fill, and either take a loser with one or two correct answers if we needed to pad out time, or take a winner with three if the show was about to close.

The presenters, one of whom remains one of ITV’s highest-rated stars, would stand in front of us all and press the plunger on a big prop telephone, which would apparently randomly pick out a winning line. But was it really random? Even before the numbers had stopped their spinning there was a guy on the other side of the studio holding up a board with the number of the line about to come up.

And as a last resort, should it all come crashing down around us and the lines all go dead, three were dummies - a different three each week - that were linked not to the outside world, but to the production gallery, so a member of the crew could step in and pretend to be a caller instead.

Even so, I don’t believe anyone was conned. The winners were real winners. They qualified to win. The randomness was random enough - after all, nobody picking the winning lines knew who was on the end of them; they only knew how many questions they’d got right. The viewers, for their part, benefited in having a more excited show to watch. And someone eventually hung up several thousand pounds richer.

I was complicit. The crew were complicit. The audience was complicit because they could see the guy with the board.

It goes on all the time, everywhere, and the only reason it has blown up this way is that the secret is out of the bag.

Well let’s stuff it back in. If this kind of stage managed entertainment is to be outlawed, because of a ruling or simply because the public develops a distaste for it, then British TV is suddenly going to get very dull indeed, and it won’t be long before we’re wishing we’d simply turned a blind eye and let it lie.

‘BBC faces fresh deception rows,’ says the Guardian. How shocking. What’s been going on? Has Huw Edwards been fibbing on the ten o’clock news? Has Watchdog been scare-mongering? Has Crimewatch been making up photo-fit pictures of imaginary criminals.

Nope - none of those.

It turns out someone may (or may not) have edited some Flog It! footage in the wrong order, to make it look like a participant in this modern-day Antiques Roadshow bid in an auction in which she never participated. Big woosh.

Even if this happened, and it’s yet to be confirmed, although the woman in question’s husband apparently made a formal complaint, then I have no sympathy for parties involved. This is reality TV in the most basic, crass sense of the genre. It’s not Big Brother, but a reality gameshow, in which the prize money isn’t put up by the broadcaster, but people bidding in the auction.

And it isn’t a documentary, either, in the true sense of the word, so has the audience really been violated in any way? Not at all. If I was told up front that this was an accurate representation - a true fly-on-the-wall biography - of events that actually happened, and if those events actually mattered or had any bearing on my life then perhaps I would have been - should have been - outraged. But who cares? If this edit was inaccurate it probably only served to enhance the programme, in heightening the tension and excitement. It was done for the good of the audience, not to pull the wool over our eyes.

But it’s not just the BBC that’s indulging in programme-enhancing editing. Production firm Optomen has been criticised for making it appear that Gordon Ramsey managed to spear a fish before cooking it on an open fire, when in fact the sea-based spearing was done by a fish-spearing expert.

Did anyone really believe it could have been any different?

I’m sorry, but if you’re naive enough to believe that someone who has no experience of catching fish this way could step out into the ocean and hook themselves some hoki on their very first attempt then you’re too stupid to own a TV license.

TV shows are edited. For your own benefit. The sooner viewers realise that, and the sooner broadcasters stop beating themselves up for giving us a better viewing experience, the sooner they can get back to quality programmes like Dancing on Ice.

If not, they’re going to get to the point where they’re apologising for misrepresenting the live studio audience by putting laughter tracks on their comedy shows.

And besides, this reeks of double standards. I remember very clearly a statement in the front of The Da Vinci Code stating that ‘all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate’. That goes far further than this programmes ever did in purporting to portray some version of truth, yet the backlash has been more concerned with writing style and originality than veracity.