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Paul Williamson from Deloitte »The source of that faint rumbling noise that you’ve no doubt heard in the distance recently has finally been confirmed as a large number of London television executives moaning as they beat their breasts in penitence and supplication.
Over the last few weeks, a whole host of programmes have been found to be ‘fake’ in one way or another.
From Children In Need and Blue Peter to Richard & Judy and GMTV, so many of our broadcasting institutions have been found to be built on shifting sands that it’s almost become easier to list the ones that aren’t under suspicion.
At one end of the spectrum, we find human error – the basic cock-up theory – whilst at the other, we have deliberate dishonesty, but I’m not buying either of those simplistic solutions.
For me, the problems have arisen from a multitudinous variety of factors, including, but not only, the sheer speed of live broadcasting, the desperation of programme-makers to find ways in which to ‘interact’ with their audiences, no matter how inane (is the world really going to weep at the permanent demise of You Say, We Pay?), and the expectation amongst audiences that they’re almost certainly not going to win, which means they won’t make a fuss when they don’t.
There are no doubt dozens of other reasons that commentators plenty brighter than me will pick their way through during the silly season, and I’m looking forward to avoiding their wise words by being away on holiday.
While I’m elsewhere, I’m hoping that the period of reflection our broadcasters are currently going through will lead them to realise that not everything has to move at a million miles an hour – after all, the slower you approach a corner, the less likely you are to cut it.
Perhaps the saddest part of the whole sorry episode is that various people that I was sure were fakes – Ant & Dec, Jade Goody and Ricky Gervais, to name just a few – appear to actually be real, but I’m hoping that further exhaustive investigation will reach a conclusion that I will find more satisfactory…
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