Ringing in the profits

Do viewers have a genuine chance of winning money with premium rate TV shows, asks CONOR POPE

IF YOU WERE asked to name something white in order to win €300, how long would it take before you guessed ricotta cheese? Ten minutes? Two hours? A lifetime?

When the question was posed recently on PlayTV – the controversial late-night TV3 game show – it took nearly three hours and a number of increasingly bizarre hints from an endlessly wittering host before someone got the answer right and won themselves the cash.

While there is little that is funny about a programme that has been the subject of numerous complaints to the broadcasting watchdog since it first aired last May, it was hard not to laugh at some of the answers the watching public came up with to the question. “Cream?” answered one caller hopefully. Er, no, the colour of cream would be cream. “A white tap?” asked another caller. White wine, white scones, gold and lamps were other guesses that came and went before someone finally struck cheese.

But the biggest winner on the night wasn’t the last caller but TV3 and the makers of PlayTV. The programmes have been designed to maximise profits for both. It costs €1.50 to call the show and the chances of winning any money are often remote as not only are the questions ridiculously difficult, only a very small percentage of callers even make it on air to play for the cash.

The night after the white question, viewers were asked to guess five girls’ names containing five letters. While two were quickly identified by callers who won small cash prizes, over the next three hours not one single person out of the many people who contacted the show could identify the other names on the game board – the programme ended without a big reveal so viewers were left wondering what those three names might have been.

One night last week, viewers had to guess the word in an envelope being waved about by the presenter using at least five letters hidden in a grid made up of 36 letters. Price Watch had a go and, after staring at the letters for a few seconds, we genuinely spotted the word “fraudulent” so immediately phoned the premium rate number.

Like all callers, we were first asked a general knowledge question. “Paris is the capital of France – true or false? We went with true and after a brief pause, a pre-recorded voice said: “Amazing! You almost got into the show!” Then the line went dead.

We called back and this time the general knowledge question was about Harry Potter – was he a rock star or a magician? We got it right (yay!) and the recording said: “Close call! If you really want to win try again right now.” So we did, obviously.

“Jupiter is a planet – true or false?” True, true, true. Another pause and then: “Brilliant! You almost got through to the show. Try again right now.”

We gave it a final whirl, correctly deduced that Moscow was the capital of Russia, waited through the dramatic pause only to hear: “Excellent! No bullseye this time but the prize is still waiting for you.” Six quid gone in 90 seconds. Eating the cash, a cold hard euro at a time would have been a more pleasurable way to waste the money.

Hours later, and with our eyes on stalks, we found out that the word PlayTV was looking for was, of course, Coypu, which, as most readers will be instantly aware is a large, herbivorous, semi-aquatic rodent originally native to temperate South America.

We contacted Ronan Redmond, the commercial manager of TV3, to see if he knew what a Coypu was – he hadn’t a clue. More importantly, we wanted to find out if he believed PlayTV – recorded in a purpose-built studio in Budapest – was the sort of TV his station should be broadcasting and whether he thought the games really offered the watching public a genuine chance of winning money.

He accepted that the programme might not be to everyone’s tastes – including his own – but offered a robust defence of it nonetheless. He said it attracted around 16,000 viewers nightly with between 3,000 and 6,000 calling in. He refused to say how much money TV3 makes from the programme, although based on his own caller numbers, the programme should have revenue of around €2.5 million annually. He also declined to say how many people actually get to go on air each night other than to say it could be anywhere between 20 and 300 – on the three occasions Price Watch tuned in over recent weeks, the number was a whole lot closer to 20 than 300.

When asked why so few people actually get to play for the prize, he said the decision as to what games were played was made on a nightly basis by the producer. He also insisted that there had been in excess of 2,000 winners and €600,000 given away in prizes since the programme first aired. “It is the most restricted TV programme out there. It answers to ComReg, RegTel and BAI and it went to air with their approval.”

He pointed out that it was on “past midnight and people have to make the decision to call the number and can decide themselves what the odds of winning are. If there wasn’t an audience then we wouldn’t be showing it. We don’t have the luxury of a licence fee – we are a commercial station.”

PlayTV received a severe rap on the knuckles last month from the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI).

The watchdog found that it had engaged in practices that were “misleading and unfair” and it upheld 10 complaints against the gameshow, to add to a further 16 complaints upheld by its predecessor, the Broadcasting Complaints Commission (BCC). The chairman of the BAI’s compliance committee, Prof Chris Morash, described PlayTV as a matter of “ongoing concern”.

His committee found there was a “lack of transparency about the rules of engagement, the presentation was misleading and the quiz was conducted unfairly” and it criticised the show for suggesting all viewers had to do was to ring a number to solve the puzzle, describing it as “inaccurate”.

In the same week, the Minister for Communications Eamon Ryan, who himself wasted over €50 trying to make contact with the show last year, for experimental reasons, issued a statement which touched on possible sanctions for the programme. He said that under the Broadcasting Act, 2009, TV3 and PlayTV would “come under the regulatory regime of ComReg” and will be “obliged to have a licence to operate and must abide by the conditions of that licence. Failure to comply will result in possible suspension or revocation of the licence and broadcasters can be fined up to €250,000”.

The claim that broadcasters and programme makers could be fined for breaching the terms of their licences was described by Labour’s communications spokesperson Liz McManus as “totally false” and she accused him of lacking “bottle” when it came to tackling premium-rate service providers.

She told Price Watch last week that the new Communications Bill provided a fine of that amount only for companies operating without a licence. “I submitted an amendment to make it an offence with a fine of up to €250,000 to breach the terms of a licence. This was rejected out of hand by the minister,” she said.

“The minister hasn’t got the bottle to deal with this properly,” McManus says. She says that the makers of the programme and TV3 have “special access to people’s homes and we have to be absolutely certain they are not going to use that access to rip people off”.