Except OFCOM, the commerical broadcast regulator, has reprimanded GMTV for essentially linking to another website from its’ main website.

During a broadcast, viewers were invited to apply for free gym passes via GMTV’s website. Once they got there, they were told to click through to moneysavingexpert.com to pick up the gym passes. Ofcom said this is effectively promoting Lewis’s business and breaches rule 10.3 of the broadcasting code which states products and services must not be promoted in programmes.

Hrm…

(The BBC documentary that was actually made partly from these rushes is The Virtual Revolution, presented by the divine Dr. Aleks Krotoski, Saturdays at 8.30pm on BBC Two)

Incidentally, it’s nice to know that I have finally achieved my ambition to have my name listed on a BBC network programme’s credits. Even if it’s only my netname, and it’s only listed on the website…

This would be great, if it was not Friday at 4pm, they were on the ground floor of the building I work in and only the bottom two floors (those belonging to BBC Worldwide) are enjoying the party, complete with mince pies, wine, DJ and glitterball. In the meantime, the wage slaves up above have to – in theory – keep working.

It wouldn’t be so bad if I hadn’t arrived back at the BBC just when the Christmas party limit was slashed, so my “departmental” Christmas party last week was at a bar, and consisted of some free drink – and far too late – some very unChristmassy canapes. Although I’m lucky I got to go to one at all, I suppose…

Then again, my first BBC Worldwide Christmas party was quite an eye-opener. I’d only been working for a week, and got shepherded to the party at Heaven, which included girls dancing in cages, and ice sculptures where you could drink vodka from an ice woman’s breast. This was 1997, mind you…

In the UK, we’re told that BBC World News provides an unbiased global perspective of the news. But the main items on BBC World News last night were:

- UK stock market falling
- US presidential debate, with the ubiquitous Matt Frei
- a couple of small pieces about anti-government riots in Peru and Thailand
- The “And finally”… piece about a Chinese art exhibition in Chelsea

In other words, it was almost like watching a standard BBC News broadcast, with slightly less emphasis on UK events. I can’t help thinking that if you live in Cleveland, Calcutta or Canberra, these bits of news will be fantastically irrelevant. Especially learning about an art exhibition in Chelsea, for goodness’ sake. Even when being global, the BBC’s still very London-parochial.

So it’s interesting that in a recent speech on the future of the BBC, he apparently declared that:
- the BBC should not be ghettoized
- he regularly breaks the digital lock on the BBC’s iPlayer
- the very existence of the iPlayer is making a lot of enemies for the BBC

It would be very interesting to find out whether he thinks the iPlayer lock should be beefed up (thus perpetuating the digital arms race), or whether he (as a rights provider of some considerable length) would be prepared to let his content loose online. Or whether it should be shut down entirely.

So when I meandered over to my designated table for a day of brainstorming, I was a little astonished to find Ashley Highfield sitting there, prodding around with some digital device or whatever. I said Hello, and mentioned that I indirectly worked for him at BBC Wales as a content producer. He grunted, said Hello, and then made his excuses and left.

Fast-forward about half a decade, and I’m back at the BBC, in the heart of the Media Village. I don’t work indirectly for Highfield at all any more, but he must have seen me lurking around the corridors of power, because less than two weeks later, his resignation has been announced…

If you’d like other fascinating stories about how I indirectly caused Kurt Cobain’s suicide and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s death, please ask.

(This is a very tongue-in-cheek post, brought to you in a desperate attempt to see if opportunistic blogging will raise viewing figures. Just, y’know, to see…)

If this is true, then this is frankly amazing. Online votes of all levels have been deliberately rigged by outside parties since the dawn of the Internet, from naming a cat to voting in a UK political election. Surely if you had evidence that a vote had been rigged, you’d take steps to counteract that rigging, and deal with the result – or make it clear that the vote will only influence the decision, not decide it outright.

If this is what happened with Mr. Marston and he’s been sacked as a result of taking a proactive effort to restore balance, that’s positively wrong.

But it’s oh-so-British, isn’t it? To flog yourself silly and beg for forgiveness from a public who either don’t care or are just laughing in the street.

Hark back to a golden age when the licence fee was only £55, alternative comedy was cool enough to be mentioned on mainstream television (albeit from the toilet) – and more importantly, pubs weren’t decked out in steel chrome.

For all us TV archivists, can you tell me what year this was from? Bob Geldof witters on about Live Aid, so it’s certainly post 1985…

I particularly like the one just after the 1988 Lockerbie plane crash, when 250+ died in a plane inferno, and Prince Phillip sympathised, saying: “People usually say that after a fire it’s water damage that’s the worst. We’re still trying to dry out Windsor Castle.”

Getting back to the BBC debacle, surely you’d expect the head of BBC One at least to read his speech before reading it out to a bunch of assembled media journalists. Surely the phrase “Annie Leibovitz gets it slightly wrong and the Queen walks out in a huff” should ring at least a couple of alarm bells – you are, after all, working for the BBC, not Channel Five or Babestation. Or does no-one read what they say before they say it any more?