Fleece the audience

It is now all but impossible to remember a time when Saturday-night TV did not come with an unwelcome adjunct, insidious tax. Almost every new format that has appeared on prime-time schedules since Pop Idol became the roaring success of Saturday-evening light entertainment has come replete with its own premium-rate phone line.

Hiding beneath the modern disguise of "interactivity", thrusting young TV executives have hit a win-win commercial groove, at the direct expense of their viewers. These canny businessmen have realised that the best way to keep viewers firmly gripped is by presenting them with the shallow illusion that they are somehow in control of what they are watching. So we are encouraged to vote via phone, text or the internet for our favourites among competitors in the tritest of disciplines.

Everything from representatives in the Eurovision song contest through ballroom-dancing celebrities to our favourite comedy moments is now subject to premium-rate phone-line votes. The conclusion to these shows is aired later the same evening, to maximise revenues from the phone lines and to keep channel loyalty. Someone is laughing all the way to the bank.

If the viewer's sense of inclusion is going to line the pockets of telecommunications giants and independent production companies, then so much the better. Where once it was the forum for viewer empathy - climaxing with the brilliantly self-explanatory My Kind of People - Saturday-night television is now a forum in which viewers are expected to pay for the right to feel involved.

Rarely has so blatant a form of money laundering been tacitly endorsed on such a grand level. The complicity among television executives - most noticeably at the BBC - in believing this is the way to run things has sent viewers into a soporific trance. It is as if we are, indeed, all voting for our favourites from the comfort of our own homes in a jolly extension of the Butlins talent contest instead of being hoodwinked and fleeced.

This Saturday the latest exponents of this cheap racketeering scam will find themselves in prime spots on the schedule again. On BBC1, the effervescent Graham Norton will implore the audience of Strictly Dance Fever to vote by phone for one of a selection of novice disco-dance duos, seemingly beamed in from another time and place, wearing home-made costumes concocted from tinsel, sequins and Lycra. Norton will crank the emotional pornography dial up to maximum volume - he's a good people person, precisely the reason he is fronting this - as he implies that the future of these contestants relies upon you, the viewers, voting. Which in many ways it does, at least for the next couple of hours. Just picking up that phone is going to give another nobody a bite of the fame cherry. Is this really what the BBC considers to be public-service broadcasting?

Switch channels and that gurning imbecile Vernon Kay, bedecked in a trouser-suit only slightly less garish than the whirling dervishes on the other side, will head up another clarion call. Hit Me Baby One More Time involves five pop acts of a long-forgotten, non-specified vintage having another shot at fame. Again, the fate of these poignantly sad-looking karaokists will depend on you, the viewer, phoning a premium-rate line to hear Kay's recorded message of thanks on the other end of the wire. The results show will follow, preceding the news, lending the whole unfortunate escapade another bucketload of incommensurate gravitas.

I understand the tenets of this new, fiercely competitive television world and its smash-and-grab approach to ratings in the multichannel age. I would even cautiously applaud the creative sponsorship deals that have turned into revenue streams for producers and channels alike in this climate. I don't feel any particular nostalgia for a time before Cadbury was the "proud" sponsor of Coronation Street and Herbal Essences revitalised its brand by association with Desperate Housewives. But this phone tax is something darker altogether. A lone viewer huddled on the sofa clutching his or her mobile is a different proposition altogether to a multinational confectioner or shampoo manufacturer.

The worst aspect of this new TV tax is that it actually lets the television industry off doing its job properly. Now they have found solace in the phone-line endorsed bun-fight between individuals struggling for the right to fame, they no longer have to find formats or presenters or, heaven forbid, original ideas with which the public genuinely engage. In this televisual temperature it is almost possible to understand the hysterics the BBC put into promoting the new Doctor Who. It came as no small surprise to learn that we weren't voting for the return of the Daleks on that one.

paulflynn71@btinternet.com