MPs have been watching call-in TV quiz shows and they cannot get over the horrible truth. As you may know, these are the programmes in which viewers spend 75p a call to try to win big cash prizes. It has all come as a terrible shock for MPs on the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. Yesterday they held a mini-inquiry and called the shows trash TV and misleading trash at that. But, you know, I think what MPs hate the most was that when they watched the shows, they didn’t know the answers.
“I was watching The Mint on ITV at a quarter to one in the morning,” said Tory MP Nigel Evans. “That is how sad I am.” Actually, this wasn’t so much sad as the most interesting thing that Nigel has ever said (though he wouldn’t know that). He noted that, as he watched, the prize went from £2,000 to £10,000 as callers tried to find the right words to join with “red”.
Nigel thought this frightfully easy. “So you had to be fairly well in a vegetative state not to come up with at least one word,” he noted but then added: “So Red Arrows, red wine, red letter day, red tomato, red herring, red alert, Red Rum, red carpet were the ones that were on and none of them won!”
Nigel was seeing red over red. He turned his anger on Jeff Henry, director of ITV Consumer and so the man ultimately responsible for the red outrage. Nigel demanded to know how many people called and how many got through. Jeff said it was 100,000 an hour and that, in general, one in 400 got through.
Nigel snapped back: “It’s a bit of a lottery then!” As he fumed, other MPs did the maths and said that figure couldn’t be right because that would mean 250 calls an hour would get through. Jeff was unfazed. “Absolutely,” he said, “I said that is across all of our services. You saw one particular programme.”
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OK, so what about The Mint? Nigel was raging: “Don’t you think you have the moral responsibility to say, ‘Phone this number, you have one in 400, 500, 600, 1,000 chance of getting through’ ?” Jeff demurred, as any information would be out of date the moment it was put on the screen. He didn’t want to mislead viewers.
“No, Jeff,” cried Nigel. “What’s misleading is having someone on the television who says, ‘Come on, phone this number now! You have a chance of getting through!’ ” Nigel then realised that the figure might be higher. “Is there a chance there is more than one in 1,000? It is a very popular show. Is it much more? Could it be one in 5,000?”
Jeff said, his face expressionless: “It could be.” He babbled for a bit, and finally admitted that at peak time there would be about a one in 5,000 chance of getting through.
MPs, shocked to have an answer, weren’t done yet. They noted that one quiz question had been what was most likely to be in a lady’s handbag. “The top answer was Rawlplugs!” cried an MP.
This set Nigel off again. “So what did win last night! Red Dwarf! Yeah! Or in the red!” He snorted. Then Minister Shaun Woodward admitted that he too had entered the red quiz. “I can tell you the answer was not red jelly!” he cried.
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So what did win? I can reveal that the top answer was Red Sox. The others were red blood cell, red line and red meat. But that information, I know, may just be a red rag.