Today’s Mediaguardian has a cover story looking at the recent growth of “quiz television” programming – particularly highlighting the recent success of ITV Play with it’s Mint and Quizmania strands running overnight on ITV1 as well as on a separate channel.
Clearly ITV Play in particular has been very successful, earning profits of £9m on a turnover of £27m according the Mediaguardian article. But this is cash direct from the listener’s pocket – well their phone bill anyway.
Amusingly, when Charles Allen gave the MacTaggart lecture the other weekend at the Edinburgh Television Festival, one of his complaints about Channel 4 was about the fact that for the last year or so they’ve been running Quiz Call. As an aside, I must admit that while ITV has been woeful of late, I do have a lot of sympathy with Allen – not because it’s damaging his business, but because it’s not behaving in a manner fit for a public service broadcaster.
The article notes that Icstis, the premium rate services regulator, has denied investigating quiz TV services. This isn’t surprising as the services to say how much they cost, although that “other operators may vary” statement is very loose. When they say “vary” they do mean “cost more” don’t they. Don’t go using your mobile phone for these things for goodness sake.
Similarly, Ofcom isn’t specifically investigating the sector. It’s The Gambling Commission’s look at these channels that I’m awaiting, since as far as I’m concerned, since I consider that these channels are basically running as lotteries.
The most popular games are effectively versions of Blankety Blank with little or no skill involved since you’re just guessing what words they selected to follow, say, “Big ____.” Otherwise, they’re running nearly impossible to fathom “Add all the numbers” games, the answers to which are never explained.
I firmly believe that the operators of these services also need to make clear the probabilities that callers are taken to air. If that means an additional graphic on-screen to highlight the current odds, then so be it.
I still live in hope that this whole fad will burn itself out sooner rather than later. What I do know is that any channels running half decent fare – say films – into the night, should be able to clear up from an audience’s perspective.