This telly tosh is another wheeze to tax stupidity

Forgive the cynicism, but one can't help feeling the most fake thing in the whole telly fakery saga is ITV's contrition. On the same day that Ofcom fined them £5.675m for "seriously and repeatedly misleading their audience", ITV revealed that the 2005 "people's choice" British Comedy Award had been given to Ant and Dec, despite the fact that Catherine Tate had polled more premium-rate phone votes. Understandably, speculation has arisen that the broadcaster saw Thursday as a good day to bury bad news - though it was unclear which of these shockers was supposed to be interring the other, says Marina Hyde.

You hear a lot of talk about demographics in television, with timeworn received wisdom stating that the advertisers want shows that appeal to their much-courted ABC1s. Unfortunately, you also hear a lot of talk about there being no bloody advertisers these days. ITV's strategy to counter this seems to have been twofold. First: make shows that appeal to the much-courted gullible viewer demographic, hence the pox of endless phone votes dressed up as "interactivity", even though the last thing people appeared willing to countenance was ceding any editorial control to the plebs.

The second plank of the strategy - and in a minute we'll come to depressing indications that this one is nowhere near as abandoned as ITV would have you believe - was to appeal to the much-courted drunken moron bracket. Yes, I'm afraid it's time to revisit the broadcaster's now defunct phone-in brand, ITV Play, and more specifically The Mint.

Did you ever see this show, which until last year ran for hours on end after midnight, and which asked often obscurantist questions of the few callers taken off premium-rate hold? If not, it is best described as ITV's attempt to construct a 10th circle of hell, then encourage the deeply irksome presenter Brian Dowling to fill it with callers hoping to win "a life-changing amount of money" (£200). Ofcom tartly observed that viewers invited to guess the contents of a woman's handbag could not reasonably have been expected to go for rawlplugs and a balaclava. Yet when the questions weren't wilfully impossible, The Mint was somehow even worse, unable to hide the fact that it was basically a wheeze to tax stupidity. "List any four-digit number," Brian instructed on one occasion. "74,310," the caller replied. Other typical howlers? Question: "Name a county in the UK." Answer: "France." "Name a celebrity quiz show host." "Sheffield." "Name a celebrity with a nickname." "Condoms."

The Mint was a show no ITV executive could have watched without cringing, because even by the standards of call-TV it was shoddy. To my knowledge, some senior staff were sheepish about the vast sums being raked in by such a poor-quality product. Thank God nobody one knew socially saw the thing. Eventually, though, the viewers got it into their thick heads that the call selection system was grossly unfair, and the business with the rawlplugs and all the other telly fakery combined to put them off phoning in. Announcing ITV Play's closure last year, Michael Grade stated: "Viewers have voted with their dialling fingers." And we all know in what sacred reverence ITV hold a viewer vote.

Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that in recent weeks industry gossip has hinted there was a certain impatience on ITV's part for Ofcom to hurry up and hand down their fine. The sooner it was out of the way, you see, the sooner they could start coining it off the viewers again, in one of those late night shows that no one who really matters sits slack-jawed in front of. So now we've drawn a line under the unpleasantness ... eyes down, ladies and gents, for Bingo Night Live! ITV's latest attempt to charm the Bafta judges will go out from midnight on weekday nights, and your host is strongly rumoured to be Mr Brian Dowling. Upsettingly, ITV didn't want to discuss details of this latest outreach programme yesterday, but enough has seeped out to give you a flavour. According to sources close to the project, the TV game will be free to enter (unlike The Mint), but is intended to drive viewers to ITV's gambling website, where they can play poker and the like for premium rates.

Do you see what they've done there? The business of parting viewers with their cash has been bumped off air - where it's regulated by Ofcom - to the web. Where it isn't. As for the show, it will feature an array of guests who "include statisticians who will talk about the most fortunate parts of the country and the luckiest star signs". So they're clearly going after the gullible gambler demographic now. Of course, ITV is a commercial enterprise and it has to make money. But what does it say about a broadcaster that their revenue-generating ideas appear to revolve around getting gamblers or drunks to bung them cash? Until they take the harder route and start making better television, us lowly viewers should take heed of James Bond's sound advice in one of the Ian Fleming books. According to 007, one should never trust a business that makes its money after midnight.