Blue Peter fakes result of children's charity phone-in competition
Howard Lake | 14 March 2007 | News
The BBC has admitted that its staff faked the results of a phone-in competition last November which benefited Unicef and has apologised.
According to BBC News, callers were not managing to get through to the studio to take part in the competition due to a technical problem. To ensure a winner was chosen, “a member of staff asked a child who was visiting the show to pose as a caller and answer a question live on air.”
Calls were charged at 10p each, with 3.25p going to children’s charity Unicef. Blue Peter and the BBC itself did not generate any income themselves from the competition.
Advertisement
Blue Peter is the latest programme to be named in the scandal of faked or faulty premium rate phone-in TV show competitions.
Blue Peter editor Richard Marson told BBC News: “this edition of the programme fell short of the high standards Blue Peter viewers quite rightly expect. We are very sorry for the way this competition was conducted.”
BBC Children’s controller Richard Deverell added that the incident was a “serious error of judgement”. Blue Peter will broadcast an apology on its programme today.
Blue Peter’s statement contradicts the BBC News report about calls not getting through. The programme makers assert that all the 13,862 calls were registered. The technology that failed was, according to Blue Peter, “the retrieval system allowing our production team to make a selection from the calls.”
The calls raised £450.52 which has been paid to UNICEF in support of the Shoe Biz Appeal helping children orphaned by AIDS in Malawi. In addition, the telecommunications company which operated the service, Telecom Express, donated their share of the revenue, £207.93, to the Appeal.
In a statement on the programme’s website, the programme makers offer: “if you feel that you’d like the cost of your call refunded, we are happy to do that. We are also happy to donate that money to our Appeal if you’d prefer.”
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.