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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.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 at 8:29 am and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.