I don't know who started the current trend for the money-grabbing dumbing down of television. It may have been Richard and Judy with their asininely easy phone-in competition Midday Money[Which of these is a type of hat? a) cat, b) cap, c) car]. It may have been Chris Tarrant's £100 questions on Who Wants To Be A Millionnaire[Which of the following means 'very cold'? a) sneezing, b) freezing, c) wheezing, d) breezing]. It may have been all those cheap daytime shows which started sandwiching every commercial break with a phone-in competition [Who was Queen Victoria's husband? a) Prince Albert, b) David Beckham] - although, to be honest, that one is perhaps a bit on the hard side. You might even argue it was the appearance of ITV on our screens, fifty years ago this month, that began the slippery slide into non-publically funded television. But, whatever the case, self-funding TV programmes appear to be the way forward. The BBC gets the licence fee, ITV gets its dwindling share of the UK's advertising cake, but the majority of new digital channels seem to be able to survive only if you the viewer can be conned into donating them money. Tempt the most gullible members of your audience into believing that they're clever and that they have a good chance of winning a big prize, and hey presto you have a cash cow on your hands.
I first noticed the advance of interactive TV scum last year while I was flicking through the lesser channels on my brother's Sky box. There, tucked in amongst the rap video montages, the QVC clones and the imported tele-evangelists, were a few glorified bingo channels fronted by voluptuous blondes who constantly urged you to ring in and play with their coloured balls. This was no-brain television, both to watch and to create. Then last month, fast-forwarding through the current Sky Digital line-up, I discovered that the situation had got several times worse. The latest infestation involves a series of phone-in quiz channels - either posing a series of blindingly obvious word/picture puzzles (essentially a lottery) or asking devious trick questions (essentially an on-screen con trick for the desperate). Still, at least none of this rubbish had invaded my own Freeview-based set. Until this week...
Quiz Call (Freeview channel 37) has brought lowest common denominator television to terrestrial viewers. Yes, lower even than Sky Travel, price-drop tv or Men & Motors. A series of earnest but lively presenters introduce the world's easiest puzzles, pretend they can't work out the solution and wave oversized banknotes at the camera. Later they drop blatant hints to the answer just in case your IQ isn't quite in double figures, wait for sufficient viewers to ring in (at 60p a call) and then take a call from someone to whom a prize of £50 is a life-changing amount. And repeat. The presenters witter on endlessly to encourage you to call in, whilst keeping very quiet about the fact that you can take part online for free. Every now and then they throw in a slightly tougher challenge to keep non-morons awake, or up the ante with a special Jackpot game (which 'Sarah' won on Wednesday night in suspicious circumstances). It's compulsively awful viewing, but rather like watching the scramble for a £2 coin that some sadist has glued to the pavement. [Inspector Sands has been watching too - and he has pictures].
And this whole dial-up quiz genre works because undereducated members of the British public have absolutely no concept of qualitative probability. If you know the answer to any particular question, the odds are that thousands of other viewers do too. If you ring in five times then yes, your chance of winning will quintuple, but five times 'incredibly unlikely' is still 'incredibly unlikely'. If you fork out 60p on every call you make then every unlucky loss soon mounts up and cancels out any pathetic winnings you may accrue. And as for that Jackpot eight-rung-ladder game, you may think you have a great chance of finding the correct path to the top but the odds are actually the same as flipping eight heads in a row - 255 to 1 against. The only winner here is Channel 4, whose digital progeny this leeching channel is, shamelessly exploiting the phone bills of the poor and debt-ridden. Still, at least these willing victims are enjoying themselves as they sink slowly deeper into poverty. In all probability anyway.
