It’s often occurred to me that shopping channels probably do a fair bit of their business after the pubs close and people stagger back home flick on the telly and suddenly realise that they really do need a Lean Green Grilling Machine or whatever.
I once saw one of the guys from Bid(Up) TV actually letting viewers know that it was no use them witholding caller ID and making drunk purchases as their systems could still get my number. I doubt that this is true, but I’ve no doubt that being an operator at that time of night is probably an interesting thing. “Interesting” in the sense that being a late night cabbie’s also “interesting.”
There’s an appalling new channel that’s just launched called Quiz Call, which joins the multitudes of dubious merit channels scattered across Sky Digital. They usually involve some attractive young woman standing in front of a blue screen on which is projected a computer graphics roulette table or whatever. Maybe they’re asking questions so trivial that they’d make even the puzzle setters on GMTV blush at the simplicity. Then they take a caller to air who can surely be the only person in the country not to know the answer.
These channels carry no advertising, and rely on callers phoning on a premium rate number. When they dial, there’s no guarantee that they’ll be put through to the studio. Indeed with calls to Quiz Call costing 60p each, with, let’s say 40p going to the TV channel, they need to have 250 calls before they’ve earned enough to pay for a £100 prize.
So far, so unextraordinary. Just another case of a cynical corporation getting the poorest and stupidest proportion of the population to hand over more money they probably can’t afford in a scheme that’s not far removed from straightforward gambling.
But there are a couple of things you should know about Quiz Call. First, it’s owned and operated by Channel 4 – the public service broadcasting company. And it’s the first of these channels to be “made available” on Freeview. OK, so in this instance the production company involved is “Ostrich Media” – and it’s probably as well that it isn’t festooned with 4s like E4, Filmfour or the forthcoming More4 – if only because the production values are so amateurish.
The studio sets are fine, but who decided that Impact was a great font to use, and flashing “WIN WIN WIN” on the screen every so often was a good idea. The sound effects are annoying in the extreme, and you’ve got to actually feel vaguely sorry for a presenter who basically has to talk non-stop, by themselves, for three hours on the trot. All they’ve really got to say is the phone number and the rules over and over again.
That’s before the morality of the whole enterprise. And at no point either on air or online, are the odds of you being put through to the studio given. Just saying that it’s “random” is not enough. If I gamble on roulette, blackjack or even poker, I can work out my odds of success. Not in this instance.
I thought that texting in to “text chat” channels was cynical, but at least with them you knew that your text would appear on screen.
Desperate, desperate television.
Anyway, sorry for that rant. What I was talking about was drunk purchases. A nameless colleague from work, let’s call him “Matt”, recently felt the need of ham late one night. Maybe he had a craving for a ham sandwich. Next morning, when he checked the fridge, he found that he had 25 packs of ham! Fortunately they were freezable, and he does actually like ham. He’s down to his last six packs now.
The same “Matt” got into work on Friday morning after a heavy night on the tiles and was a bit disturbed to get an email reading “Booking Confirmation”. It seemed that he’d gone online the previous night and booked a holiday for two to Florida in December. The same Florida that he was already heading for on another holiday in January! Working back through his call-history he found that he’d persuaded a friend to come with him at around 1am in the morning. At least he hoped that was the case, as the booking is non-cancellable, and the friend wasn’t answering his mobile last time I saw Matt.
I feel lucky now that the worst I’ve purchased in such a state was a dodgy kebab, and maybe a DVD from the late opening Virgin Megastore. No surprise holidays!