It's being widely reported that Ofcom is finally about to move to stop the tawdry and shameful phone-in competitions that litter our TV screens everywhere.
Even as recently as yesterday evening and during Simon's Cowell's Red Or Black, his latest insult to Britain's intelligence that masquerades as entertainment, if you happened to know that the French word 'Rouge' means red and not black, you could phone in on a premium rate telephone number (£1.53 per minute) to display your Stephen Fry-like colossal intellect to a robot that will then ignore your entry but keep your money.
Mrs Iris Davidson of Batley West Yorkshire, Britain's most successful competition prize winner ever, sees the Ofcom action as the culmination of many long years of campaigning by both her and an as yet unnamed Eggheads panelist, probably that CJ one, to have the so-called competition questions regulated.
Speaking from her 3-bed apartment, incidentally won in a competition on the back of a popular breakfast cereal packet with the slogan They're flakeing grrrreat!, she said, "I had started to think these things were a fix years ago when after entering one such quiz where entrants were asked to complete the numerical sequence 3 4 5...? I entered at least one hundred times myself, it cost me over £300 but I didn't care as I knew the answer which I then checked the following day. And of course every one of my entries was correct but yet I didn't win! I knew then that it must've been a fiddle designed to dupe the public. I suppose it was my own silly fault really as the show that held that particular competion was hosted by those two chancers, Ant and Dec."
The move will see broadcaster ITV hit particularly hard, as it's understood plans were well-advanced for phone-in competitions to become a regular feature of both its 6.30 evening bulletin and the flagship News at Ten programme.
