Devil's Advocate

Ian Moore

You'll have heard by now of yesterday's near-£6m fine imposed on ITV for their gameshow blunders.  Reading the judgement on 'Prize Mountain', blunder actually would be a kind description. Some £1.2m worth of SMS entries were ignored by the production team, who instead chose winners who'd sent in voicemails, on the basis of their apparent suitability to appear on TV (their 'liveliness'), and their geographical proximity to one another, so they could be visited more or less simultaneously by Les Dennis and his goodie-packed lorry.

Now, I've only once witnessed such questionable editorial judgement. That was back in the early Eighties: I had cause to observe a bruising Belfast superstore manager selecting an instore-draw-winner to receive a Ford Fiesta. He searched methodically through the box of entries, until he found an address in the poorest nearby neighbourhood. This was an era when to be a Brit visiting the Ardoyne wasn't the wisest of postings, so to conceal my Hinckley accent I maintained the silence I'd been advised to keep by the Sales Rep I was accompanying. (For all I know, the store manager picked his granny, but it seemed an excellent decision at the time).

It was an early induction into the knowledge that not all draws are random, and that some are downright fixed. I don't know how compers know this to be the case - maybe it tells them in their magazines - but know it they do, and they exploit the principle to the full. Mailed entries from compers come at you like those deprived kids who assail you as you leave the airport in a poor country, driven frantic by desperation (which is where the similarity ends, 'greed' being a more appropriate noun for compers), while the plain innocent postcards starve at the bottom of the pile.

Prize draws were never the most effective of SP mechanics - though they had their place - but now I reckon their effectiveness has probably halved, and their place is in question.