The Stage

BBC fined £95,000 over phone-in competitions

Published Thursday 18 December 2008 at 12:05 by Matthew Hemley

Media regulator Ofcom has fined the BBC a total of £95,000 for encouraging listeners to enter phone-in competitions that were actually part of pre-recorded radio shows hosted by Dermot O’Leary and Tony Blackburn.

The biggest fine - £70,000 - went to BBC Radio 2 for the inclusion of competitions in eight pre-recorded editions of O’Leary’s show broadcast between June 2006 and December 2006.

Ofcom found that the eight shows in question were pre-recorded but broadcast as live, and each included invitations for listeners to phone in and enter a competition.

“As all eight programmes had been pre-recorded, listeners had no chance of entering or winning the competitions,” the regulator said.

In three out of the eight incidents, Ofcom found that listeners had agreed to take part in the pre-recorded competitions, but were not available when the production team called them.

The production staff then called friends to take part in the competition.

Ofcom said: “Ofcom considered the breaches to be serious and repeated and therefore referred the case to Ofcom’s Content Sanctions Committee for consideration of the imposition of a statutory sanction.”

The committee found that the breaches “constituted a significant breakdown in the essential relationship of trust between a long-established public service broadcaster and its audience”.

Meanwhile, Blackburn’s show on BBC London 94.9FM has been fined £25,000 for including competitions in shows that were pre-recorded between December 2005 and December 2006.

For these shows, entrants for the pre-recorded competitions were chosen from listeners who had previously contacted the programme.

Ofcom said it was “concerned by the repeated, premeditated and deliberate decisions” to include competitions in pre-recorded shows that were broadcast as live.

In July this year, Ofcom fined the Corporation £400,000 for a series of incidents in which it faked winners and misled audiences in television and radio shows broadcast between 2005 and 2007.