IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS SACRED!
Blue Peter, flag ship BBC children’s programme, has admitted to rigging a telephone competition. Have a read of this via Reuters…
Link: BBC admits “Blue Peter” phone-in quiz was faked | Breaking City News | Reuters.co.uk
Bosses of the BBC’s long-running children’s show “Blue Peter” said on Wednesday it had faked a phone-in competition, becoming the latest programme to become embroiled in a scandal over premium rate number quizzes.
Blue Peter viewers had been asked to phone the show on a premium rate number last November for a chance to win a toy, with proceeds going towards a Unicef appeal.
Each call cost 10 pence with 3.25 pence going to charity and the BBC [BBC.UL] making no profit.
But telephone operators had technical problems which meant they could not get information to studio staff. As a result, a member of staff asked a child who was visiting the studio to phone the programme and give the answer on air.
The child then won the competition..
Now what MUPPET was running that phone service? What kind of technical problem forced the stressed-to-hell producer to have to get a token kid, (“Hey, you’re a kid right? Good. Phone this number, ok… act surprised right…”), and get the token kid to phone up just so he/she could win the competition?
Someone from the phone company couldn’t have popped out to a phone box and called the BBC studio with the details? They couldn’t have used their blackberry to whack the details to the chaps in the gallery? This is, after all, live television. You build redundancy into the system, sometimes twice if you have to.
Deary me.
I can see the position of the producer though. If you’ve gone to air and told everyone your’e doing a competition… and if thousands have been phoning up throughout the show… and then, when it comes to the crux, your telephone supplier screws up… well, you can’t cut to a blank screen. You can’t leave your talent in the studio staring blankly at their autocues. I can understand a series of circumstances where you’d have to do this, at least to preserve the expectation — rather than cut into the show and say ‘errrr sorry, technical problems…’ But the first thing you’d do after coming off air is go straight to your telecoms supplier and nut them.
Right !
Thats it… I’m sending my badge back!
Does anyone have directions to that garden they have….
Yes do tell, which is the muppet company that provided this service? Come on here and defend yourselves. Because frankly I am getting sick and bloody tired of hearing that these systems are failing on these TV shows. How long is this whole episode gonna run!? Am I the only one totally depressed by it already?
And should the presenter have just said “hey kids, this is the real world and life is tough and we aren’t always wrapped up in blankets by Tony Blair, so you’re gonna have to face facts that we won’t be presenting the winner today because of a technical problem”…well that is another discussion I guess.
But back to the technical problem…Frankly there are too many mobile companies out there who have got great (well arrogant actually) salesman, but when it comes to technical skills a camel could write better code than they all appear to be doing.
I could write a totally redundant TV voting system with my eyes blindfolded whilst abseiling down from Tower Bridge singing the “down Shep” song.
steve/itagg.com
BBC’s Blue Peter in phone in scandle shocker! what's this?