Television
The game show goes on
Published 29 January 2007
"Participation TV" has taken over the world's airwaves, with cheap game shows racking up profits from premium-rate phone lines. But is it legal? Stephen Armstrong investigates
The room is like the nerve centre of a James Bond supervillain lair. Technicians twist buttons and lights flash as a wall of screens shows images from around the world. Or, at least, they appear to be from around the world. Each screen shows a game show playing on a different television station - one from Romania, one from Russia, one from the UK, one from Indonesia. But, curiously, the games are almost identical. Viewers are exhorted to phone in and win - "What do you want, a bigger prize? Look at the size of the prize . . . £21,000!" - by female presenters who all have the same vocal pitch and body movements. It's like watching Stepford Game-Show Hell.
These standard-issue, on-screen identities are no accident. Each high-street glamour puss has been taught her craft at a bizarre game-show school in the heart of a sprawling Budapest studio. The complex is owned by Telemedia InteracTV Productions, which began life handling the phone lines for shows such as Big Brother and Survivor, before figuring out that actually making the programmes themselves couldn't be that difficult. Women are recruited in their home countries and shipped out to Hungary, where they take lessons in how to gesture and how to use their voice and their manner to maximise the game show's profitability.
"They are taught how to reach out from the screen and grab the heart of the viewer," says Jeno Torocsik, Telemedia's founder and chairman. "During the show we want the number of calls per minute to keep rising. If it does not, we change something: increase the prize amount or increase the tension. There are a hundred little things that we can do."
Once trained, the show presenters work side by side along a seemingly endless corridor of studios. In one room, a young blonde stands in a set that looks like a seaside bar; in the next, there's a respectable-looking brunette surrounded by gleaming, futuristic lines; beside her there's an Arab woman and, further down, a Romanian. All in all, Telemedia broadcasts live programming to more than 40 countries, usually iden tical shows. "We sell programming to many satellite channels in the UK," explains Torocsik, who adds, rather ruefully, that: "In other countries, we have 24-hour channels ourselves, but in the UK, the market is saturated."
Torocsik has a point. A scroll through the list of cable and satellite channels licensed by Ofcom throws up tens of so-called "participation TV" channels with names such as Big Game TV, the Bingo Channel, Friendly TV, Gala Games TV, Gamein TV3, Get Lucky, IPlay Digital, ITV Play, Jackpot TV, Quiz Call and Quizchannel. All follow the same basic formula: a simple puzzle (one recent game ran a picture of the singer Shakira and asked you to fill in the missing letters of the phrase "H_p_ _o__ L_e"), with a presenter exhorting viewers to call and win as a premium-rate phone number scrolls across the screen. "Calls cost 75p from a BT line whether you are selected or not," the moving type instructs.
Just how little chance you actually have of getting through came out during a recent hearing of the Commons select committee on culture, media and sport. In a submission, ITV said there was a one-in-400 chance of any consumer successfully calling through to the studio to play. The broadcaster admitted that, in peak time, it got up to 6,000 calls per minute. On average, one call every 85 seconds was successful. Each caller paid 75p regardless of call success. So, as they say in Hollywood: you do the math.
Participation TV isn't limited to game shows. There is also Psychic Interactive, where you pay to talk to a medium live on air, and adult chat stations that operate like porno chat lines, but with real, writhing pictures of busty "housewives". But it is the game-show version that is about to take over our mainstream channels. ITV - which runs hours of its participation-TV satellite channel ITV Play overnight - recently instructed independent producers to place some form of participation TV at the core of any pitch for a new game show.
The reasons are obvious. ITV's advertising revenue is continuing to fall, and recent research shows viewers drifting away from the television channels. Last year, BT and Channel 4 launched programme download services that allow viewers who pay a flat fee to keep a show on their Sky+ or personal computer for ever. ITV's viewers are older and far less techno-savvy, but since ITV Play launched in April on Freeview and Sky - adding to its crucial overnight slot on ITV1 - it has proved a cash cow for the ailing broadcaster, turning profits of £9m on revenues of £27m in the first six months. ITV aims to earn £20m in total from it in the channel's first year.
At the same time, the game show has gained a lease of life courtesy of Noel Edmonds and Deal or No Deal. "A year ago, I wasn't making any game shows in the UK and now I'm making them for every channel," says Tim Hincks, chief creative officer of the Big Brother production firm Endemol UK. "It's changed my business."
Endemol makes Deal or No Deal, BBC1's 1 vs 100 and In the Grid, broadcast on Channel 5. Similar projects in development include For the Rest of Your Life and Show Me the Money. ITV is looking to buy The Rich List from Fox in the US, and plans to programme game shows across its entire teatime output. Meanwhile, Channel 4 is developing two new game-show formats to cash in on Deal or No Deal, despite the woeful ratings performance of Unanimous, a psychological game show that crashed and burned over November in a prime-time Friday-night slot.
Built in to all of these programmes is an element of premium-rate phone line, which marks the third incarnation of the game show - the only form of entertainment that broadcasting can truly claim to have invented. In its primary postwar form, contestants played for cars, televisions and stereos. Over the 1980s and 1990s, such luxury items became commonplace, and the format began to lose its appeal. The idea was rejuvenated by Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?, which added what TV schedulers term "jeopardy". In Millionaire, according to the game-show creator Trish Kinane, we were watching because the contestant had so much to lose, rather than because we wanted them to win.
Millionaire can lay another claim to the dubious parentage of these shows. Launched in 1998, it pioneered the use of premium-rate phone lines in recruiting contestants. At one point the following year, so TV legend has it, the programme made more money through calls to these lines than it did through the advertising breaks within it. Since then, a rather wobbly regulatory tripod has been erected around such formats and the channels they begat: Icstis, the regulator for premium-rate telecoms services; Ofcom; and, since the Gambling Act 2005, the Gambling Commission. As a result, it is far from clear who is supposed to be responsible for participation TV. Late last year, the select committee on culture, media and sport hauled in everyone involved and tried to make sense of the whole business.
Perhaps surprisingly, BSkyB spoke out against quiz TV stations' claim that their output is essentially game-show television. "These channels are the same as gambling but are not regulated as such and need to be," Nick Rust, managing director of Sky Bet, told the committee. He argued that because they require no element of skill, they should be considered as lotteries. This was fiercely resisted by the likes of David Brook, now chairman of Optimistic Media - which runs seven participation strands and claims to have taken 100 million calls since it began operating three years ago. If these strands were defined as lotteries, they would need to be licensed by the Gambling Commission as well as Ofcom, it would be illegal for under-18s to play, and - most significantly - 20 per cent of proceeds would have to go to charitable causes. Surely cause for anxiety. The committee's findings are due shortly this year.
Prompted by MPs' interest, the three regulators have been falling over themselves to look busy. Icstis is undertaking a review of phone-in quiz services, commissioning independent consumer research; the Gambling Commission has recently consulted on made-for-TV prize competitions and free draws in relation to the Gambling Act; Ofcom is preparing a review of participation TV, aiming to establish whether it counts as editorial or advertising. Preliminary responses are due at the end of the month, and the full consultation follows shortly thereafter. "The European Television Without Frontiers Directive requires that advertising and programming be kept separate," says Kate Lee at Ofcom. "Any consultation will be with the intention to ensure that such channels are genuine editorial channels and not teleshopping by stealth."
Back in Budapest, Sara the Cash Call presenter is promising to "give as much money away as is humanly possible", caring little for the consultations of TV regulators. When Hannah calls in and solves the Shakira word game, Sara literally hurls a bundle of notes at the camera and then enters Hannah into a complex number game that could win her £3,000, but actually nets only a tenner. "Congrats, Hannah," says Sara, her eyes cold and dead, then turns towards the camera and beams. "Guys, can I just say, what a fabulous show. Really enjoyed it, and we will be back tomorrow, same time, same place. Ciao!"
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