It wasn't that long ago that if you watched an hour long programme on ITV, that you'd expect to see about three advert breaks of around three minutes long. Now though, watch an hour and a half of The X-Factor or I'm a Celebrity on a Saturday night and you can expect to sit through six advert breaks with around twenty five minutes worth of ads in total. That's to say out of ninety minutes show time, twenty five minutes or nearly a third is adverts. But it's not only far longer and far more frequent ad-breaks you have to sit through whilst watching your favourite programme nowadays. Add in recaps, previews, phone-in competitions and all the rest, the amount of actual programme you get for your well-earned time is even less.
Almost every live programme on ITV for instance has a phone-in competition which the presenters will relentelessly plug at every ad-break. If gambling was supposed to be something discouraged then no-one's told ITV. These simple phone calls will cost at least a pound a time. And the odds of winning the prize are very, very slim indeed. A pound may not seem a lot but when you have people phoning up more than once to these competitions or entering two or three a week then it all adds up. Not to metion the profit the TV channel is making from these phone calls.
Because you have hundreds of thousands trying to win that one prize. That one prize. Yes, it may be a good prize, a holiday or car or whatever. But if you have one hundred thousand people phoning up, then your odds of winning are one hundred thousand to one. You may as well go down the bookies with your pound and stick it on a reasonably priced horse. At least you have a fair chance of winning some money back.
And the reason you have around one hundred thousand people entering is because these ABC phone-in quizzes they set are ridiculously easy by anyone's standards. It's usually along the lines of 'What's the capital of England?' Is it A- Norwich. B- London or C- Britney Spiers. Or it could be asking what's the name of the planet we live on? A -Earth. B – Jupiter or C – Britney Spiers. The question is deliberatly as easy as possible because the object is to get as many people phoning up as possible. Another unfortunate consequence of this is you'll have people who are not the brightest getting excited, phoning up immediately because they know the capital of England isn't Britney Spiers and they're fairly sure, not certain, but fairly sure they aren't living on Jupiter.
When I say 'not the brightest' people by the way I don't mean that in a disparaging way. I could say the most vulnerable. But it's no doubt, those in these hard times who can't afford to lose their money gambling who will do so. The most desperate. And the actual cost of the call is easily lost in the excited spiel of the voiceover. True, the price of the phone call is shown on screen as well. As well as the fact you can enter online for free a lot of the time. But of course the miniscule print at the bottom of the screen is almost impossible to read.
Daybreak, This Morming or Loose Women are but three daytime programmes which not only have phone-in competitions but at least a two or three minute segment shown every fifteen minutes to get you to gamble your money away by making a simple phone call. Only then can you watch the adverts and see what you can buy with any money you have left.
It's certainly not just ITV who does this. Cable TV channels are even worse for adverts. It seems that whatever commercial channel you're on, the adverts aren't built around the TV programmme anymore but the other way around.
Of course, adverts bring in revenue for the TV channel and are a necessary evil. And understandably perhaps, with ITV's recent record debts they have obviously decided to squeeze out every last commercial drop of value in each programme they show. And to be fair ITV's debts are now coming down, slowly but surely. In fact, the way things are going it's only a matter of time before they turn things completely around. They are a commercial organisation and are there to make money.
It seems however one of the main aims of any commercial TV programme nowadays is to get you not only to spend your time in front of the TV but to get you to spend your money as well. Yet the morals of the phone-in competitions alongside the ever expanding ad breaks mean that making money seems to be the overwhelming priority over making entertaining programmes. The balance between ads, phon-in and actual programme content is just about tolerable at this time. But any more swing towards making profit instead of just making programmes may mean that could change sooner rather than later.
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