ITV Play (channel) - Criticisms

Criticisms

The 75p per call cost of a chance of involvement in shows, higher from mobile phones. Callers were charged for each call they made, whether connected to the studio or not. ITV had promised to make its programmes with higher production values than quiz programmes on other quiz channels, but with little evidence of such. Many of the callers were kept on hold and unable to connect.

Restrictions put on the number of attempts to call, 150 per day, mean that in a 24 hour period BT callers could still spend a maximum of £112.50 per day. This changed in February 2007 to 100 calls per day, so the maximum was £75 a day on BT.

In January 2007, Ofcom found ITV guilty of breaching its broadcasting code for making answers to its quizzes too obscure. Viewers complained after two answers to the question "what items might be found in a woman's handbag?" were revealed to be "balaclava" and "rawplugs". The 21 September 2006 quiz, was found to be in breach of the rule that "competitions should be conducted fairly". Ofcom warned ITV Play that there must be no further incident. Ofcom subsequently confirmed this was the first formal breach of the code recorded against ITV Play. For its part, ITV Play described it as a "one-off" incident of poor judgement.

The genre of interactive Quiz TV shows has also been heavily criticised by the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. They stated that call TV programmes "generally look and feel like gambling", have "a lack of fairness and transparency" and that they encourage people to call more times than they can afford. Had ITV Play been classed as a gambling channel, it would have been forced to give 20% of its profits to good causes. Labour MP Paul Farrelly went further in his criticism of channels in the participation Quiz TV genre, describing them as "tantamount to theft."