Gladiators ready!

After eight years in the wilderness, TV's best beat 'em up is back. But, says David Stubbs, for sheer stamina, the audience are the real winners...

It's 9am on a Friday morning, and some of us have just enough energy to pop an Aspirin and scribble a suicide note, no more. However, unnaturally, there are hundreds of punters crammed into a vast and (save for the 1,500 lights) gloomy hangar at Shepperton Studios, cheering like hooter monkeys, brandishing giant red and blue foam fingers with uniform abandon - except for the one chap in the third row who's frozen with terror, complaining that he has a "fear of foam". Many of them are schoolkids, for whom any escape from lessons at any time is a cue for mass cheering. Others are there to root for the competitors: Graham, Tom, Jeanine, Greg from Bristol and Gail, "The Gail Force".

Eight years after it departed ITV's screens, having attained audiences in the tens of millions, Gladiators is back on Sky TV. There's a fresh cast of warriors and new presenters, Kirsty Gallacher and Ian Wright, for whom this evidently represents a bid for gravitas, having parted company with the BBC's football panel for not treating him seriously enough. The original TV Gladiators aired in America but was quickly and successfully adopted in the UK. The 2008 version of the show has made some modifications: the costumes are marginally toned down and the gladiators themselves are leaner and meaner, rather than the puffed-up body builder types of yore. "It's less camp, more fierce," says Du'Aine Ladejo, aka Predator. "Then again, here I am sitting in a body bra!"

The games, however - including Duel and Powerball - remain much the same, while there's continuity also in John Anderson, the hardbitten Scottish referee whose stern admonitions ("Hwait for the HWHISTLE! Hthree! Htwo! Hwone!") cow both competitors and gladiators alike. "You don't mess with John," shudders Enigma, AKA Jenny Pacey, 25, a former bobsleigh competitor. She used to watch Gladiators as a child. "I used to run home from swimming galas to catch it." That, along with the realisation that Wolf, the most infamous of the male gladiators, is now entering his late 50s, is a grim reminder of time's passing.

Advance press shots of the new gladiators show a gallery of fresh characters, throwing poses against fiery backdrops, chiselled as if for a frieze. Yet beneath their fearsome monikers and descriptions persists a feeling of England, this England, its market towns, call centres and malls. Battleaxe ("A weapon of war, domineering, aggressive and indomitable, a warrior queen") is Shirley Webb, a business manager from Edinburgh. Spartan ("Handsome, disciplined and brave, will take on any army, the perfect warrior") is Roderick Bradley from Grantham. Atlas ("As strong as He-Man, fights hard but with dignity") is Sam Bond, a "charity fundraiser" from Bournemouth. Then there is Panther, AKA Kara Nwidobie ("Beautiful, sleek and prowling, fierce and aggressive - the most powerful of them all"). She is a day nurse manager from the decidedly un-Amazonian Lancaster ("A Christmas nativity play is far scarier than doing Gladiators"), who speaks with a north-west accent so engagingly unpretentious it brings her down to earth as quickly as she does Jeanine into the pool with her pugil stick during Duel. She's actually looking forward to returning to her day job. "I don't want all my kids and parents to think I'm a big meanie!" she says, though the highly competitive ex-discus thrower in her flashes briefly to the surface when she remarks upon the cockiness of the competitors circa 2008. "In the old days they were like, 'Ooh, yes, Jet's great, a wonderful gladiator.' Now they're all chatty in the interviews, saying they're going to smash us up proper."

It was Jeanine, a product of a more upfront, soundbiting, telly-ready New Britain, who made this latter remark. She was dispatched for her pains by Panther after ten or so seconds into the water, with the strains of Tubthumping striking up to add further pennies to the royalty fund that mercifully ensures that Chumbawamba need never make another record ever again. Head of the new gladiators is Du'Aine Ladejo, 36, AKA Predator, a former 400 metres European Champion. "Doing this, to me, is more fun than the Olympics - and I never thought I'd say that," he grins. He chuckles also at the persistent delusion among the general public, from whom competitors are drawn, that the gulf between themselves, fit and game as they are, and the gladiators, often B-grade track and field athletes, is not huge. The competitors, clad in their slightly humiliating blue and red rookie outfits, appear to be handpicked for gutsiness but also puniness.

Take poor Greg, who describes himself as "five foot six and a half inches tall" when interviewed by Kirsty Gallacher, herself towering above him in her heels. He is swatted aside in his challenges with the skirted Spartan, who has been the victim of bawdy and ribald chanting from the hen-party section of the crowd, unrepeatable in a family newspaper. It can be forgotten that the competitors, although pitted against the gladiators, are actually competing with each other; Battleaxe, Engima, Panther, Atlas and the rest are merely the gods hurling obstacles in their way. There is, however, an underlying morality to Gladiators, as Ladejo explains: "We're giving kids another kind of role model, one they're not getting from sports. All the gladiators, whether good or bad, do not cross the referee. We do not mess with John. He is the law."

In the context of the present-day slew of Darwinian reality shows, from Pop Idol to The Apprentice, which have flourished since the demise of the first UK Gladiators, such underlying decency might seem admirable but quaint. Could it be that this will be a turn-off for a new generation of punters virulent in their ambition to be on TV and hopefully famous, whatever it takes? Certainly, for sheer physical endurance, the award on this day of shooting must go not to the gladiators, who get to snooze or cruise Facebook in the breaks between shoots. Nor to the competitors. Nor, even, to the warm-up guy (probably the hardest-working man in the studio) whose job it is to keep the crowd geed up, with a free Wii on offer to the audience member who goes the most conspicuously and consistently crazy.

No, the endurance award goes to the audience. Today's shoot will be compressed, on TV, to 20 or so minutes of rolling action, interviews and cheering. The reality is that, from nine through four, this audience, including the foamophobe, will have been crammed inside a muggy hangar for several hours of mostly static, droning tedium without a break while Health & Safety carry out constant checks, Kirsty fluffs her lines and competitors are winched back and forth across the pool, or asked to go back into the water to re-emerge for second or third takes. Even the opera is not this cruel. Yet still they whoop on cue and wave their foam fingers. Moreover, many of them will be back for future shoots. Why?

Because it's telly. Those you'd have thought would just about die of boredom, we salute you.


It's four o'clock on the previous day and Mike Mulvihill is standing in a darkened arena surrounded by hundreds of hysterical fans. Strobe lights flash, sparks fly and flames jump to the ceiling as before us a 32-year-old mother of two from Edinburgh grapples with a former British discus thrower from Blackpool on a Perspex platform suspended 10ft in the air. There's only ever going to be one winner and as our plucky mum sails through the air to the tune of Boom! Shake the Room, I rise to my feet to join the chant. It's only then I remember that I'm wearing a pair of 3ft foam hands with the index finger pointing straight to the sky. Boom boom boom tick BOOM.

I am, of course, in the audience of Gladiators, the 1990s television series that has been revived after more than eight years. First conceived in America and launched in Britain in 1992, the series ran for eight years and, at its height, attracted 14 million viewers. Together with Baywatch and Blind Date, it formed the holy trinity of ITV's classic Saturday early evening line-up, offering good clean entertainment for all the family.

The Gladiators finally got the thumbs down on January 1, 2000, and it looked as though they had laid down their pugil sticks for good, until the recent Hollywood writers' strike threw the series an unexpected lifeline. With no scripts, big shows such as Desperate Housewives, Lost, Heroes and 24 were forced to suspend production, leaving the American TV stations with huge holes in their schedules. To help to fill the gaps, NBC revived Gladiators, with Hulk Hogan and Muhammad Ali's daughter Lalia as hosts. It proved a roaring success, pulling in 12 million viewers for its premiere. It was only going to be a matter of time before it earned a reprieve here, too.

But much has changed since Gladiators was last on our screens. It has moved channels, from ITV to Sky One, and moved days from Saturday to Sunday. The venue has changed, too, from the National Indoor Arena in Birmingham to Shepperton Studios in southwest London, and the presenters have had a facelift, with John Fashanu, Ulrika Jonsson and Jeremy Guscott (no, I don't remember him either) making way for Kirsty Gallacher and Ian Wright, who has gone from being the BBC's “court jester” to the master of ceremonies in the world's biggest adult adventure playground.

Gone, too, are the original Gladiators. Wolf has howled his last howl (well, he is 52 and running a children's play centre in New Zealand), and Saracen, Lightning, Rhino, Hunter and co have also been replaced by a younger, sexier new breed who are said to be three times fitter and stronger than their predecessors. (There's only one way to settle this, as Harry Hill would say, “FIGHT!”)

One man who is returning is the referee John Anderson (“Contender you will go on my first whistle”), who also helps to select and train the new Gladiators, and he is certainly impressed with the new crop. “The last set of Gladiators were wonderful,” he says, “but we're in the 21st century now, we've moved on and I think the expectation levels for both Gladiators and Contenders are much higher. The audience will fall in love with the new Glads,” he continues. “They will be so impressed with their quality, size and beauty. This is a stunning group - they have great personalities and they are physically superb.” Backstage I get the chance to see for myself, and I can confirm that they are an awesome sight. The men look like a much harder version of the Chippendales; the women like pumped-up Spice Girls. As I wander the corridors, with the smell of baby oil and spray tan hanging heavy in the air, I see the former Olympic medallist Du'aine Ladejo being transformed into Predator; Atlas putting the final touches to his long blond mane; and Ice rearranging her costume, which involves pulling a tiny piece of silver material from between the firmest pair of buttocks I've ever seen.

In their BacoFoil costumes, the Gladiators resemble sexy futuristic warriors - Barbarella meets the Terminator. Inferno, with her striking red hair, looks hot, Panther looks as though she could eat you alive, and Battleaxe looks as if she's having serious second thoughts about being talked into taking that name.

Tempest, at 19, is the baby of the bunch, and has the potential to succeed Jet as the most lusted-after female Gladiator. She is, in real life, the heptathalete Lucy Boggis, who harbours dreams of competing at the 2012 Olympics. The heavily tattooed Tornado is a Royal Marine who re- turns to Afghanistan after filming ends, while Oblivion, the 21-year-old, 16st wrestler Nick Aldis, is the meanest, and should claim Wolf's crown as the one everyone loves to hate. But although the faces have changed, Gladiators is still essentially the same show that you remember. “The thing about Gladiators is that it is what it is,” Wright tells me later in his dressing room. “It's Gladiators, so you can't veer off the template because that's why people love it. There's a natural drama to it, a kind of natural emotion that comes out - and you get a good message out of it as well.”

So fans can look forward to the return of Duel, Powerball, Gauntlet, the Wall and Pyramid, plus Hit and Run and Hang Tough, which now has the added fun of taking place over water. And, of course, there's the thrill of the final Eliminator. But above all, what Gladiators retains is its ability to entertain the whole family at once. Even in our fractured multichannel age, there still seems to be an appetite for its trans-generational approach. Children can enjoy the thrills and spills of the games; mums can imagine themselves in the arms of a musclebound hunk; and dads can watch scantily clad young women swinging through the air without the fear of being caught.

“I believe there's still an innocence in people that makes them want to watch good, clean, wholesome fun with no one getting hurt,” Wright says. “This is what a game show is about. This was the last real show where the normal person on the street got the chance to become a hero to their kids, their family, everybody, then just go back to being a normal person again. That is what used to be entertaining and what is still entertaining today.” And if the reaction of the 1,000-strong crowd at Shepperton Studios, and just about everyone else I've spoken to, is anything to go by, he's right. It seems that Gladiators fever has gripped the nation once again. Gladiators ready. Contenders ready. Viewers ready. AWOOGA.

Where are they now?

Wolf AKA Michael Van Wijk

Recruited for Gladiators while taking anger management courses. Famously duped into appearing on the appeal to save Karla The Elephant on Brass Eye ("She needs Wolf Power or she will explode in a shower of pulped yams"). Today, at 55, Van Wijk kicks younger ass on the New Zealand caged fight scene.

Jet AKA Diane Youdale

The big-haired object of adolescent longing left after a fall during Pyramid. She now teaches Pilates in Manchester and runs lifestyle workshops.

Rhino AKA Mark Smith

The massive Rhino's most notable achievement since Gladiators Mark 1's demise was to beat up lottery winner Michael Carroll in a boxing match for charity. Today he crops up as a heavy everywhere, in TV series ranging from The Bill to Robin Hood.

Amazon AKA Sharron Davies

The current face (and shoulders) of BBC swimming coverage - not to mention Olympic silver medallist - was a Gladiator for one season only. She left after complaining about health and safety procedures. Wuss. Did Maximus ever whine about those tigers?

Gladiators, Sun, Sky One, 6pm/10pm

Schtumbleword Verboten!

Sometimes I think the whole of humankind can be separated into two types: those who pay attention to song lyrics, and those who don't. And those who don't should be rounded up and throttled to death. By robots. With merciless strangling hands says Charlie Brooker.

I'm exaggerating, but only slightly. I love lyrics. If you don't listen to the words, you're no friend of mine. The words are where 50 per cent of a song's meaning resides, and it's shocking how many people just don't seem to hear them, even when they're startlingly clear. I once had to explain to someone what 'Common People' by Pulp was about, even though they'd listened to it a billion times. How wilfully dumb can you get?

Perhaps I find it frustrating because I've been cursed with an almost autistic ability to memorise song lyrics after one or two listens. But rather than recall them accurately, I tinker about and replace them with new words for my own amusement; and it's these re-written versions which ultimately remain lodged in my mind. I can't hear 'Thinking Of You' by Sister Sledge, for instance, without assuming the chorus goes: "I'm thinking of you/And the things you do to me/That make me love you/Now I'm livin' in Exeter".

My current favourite internalised mental replacement lyric is a disarmingly basic one in which I simply substitute the name Eleanor Rigby with "Robert Mugabe", because it scans. Every time I watch the news and something about Zimbabwe comes on, I hear Paul McCartney lament that Robert Mugabe died in the church and was buried along with his name. Nobody came. This is why I'd be hopeless on Don't Forget The Lyrics! (Sun, 7pm, Sky One), a new Shane Richie gameshow whose primary game mechanic is explained in its title.

And it's quite bossy, that title. It sounds like the sort of thing an insane Nazi commandant forcing a yard full of PoWs to perform a musical at gunpoint might bark at the top of his voice just before shooting someone for fumbling the chorus of Frosty The Snowman. They should've called it "Nicht Forgetten Das Lyrics!", or "Schtumbleword Verboten!". Or "Don't Forget the Lyrics, Mofo!", which isn't very German, but accurately conveys the urgency of the situation.

Anyway, the show is just like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire only with karaoke instead of questions. Each week, an annoying member of the public comes on and jumps up and down and says how excited they are until you want to punch them all the way to Barbados and back. Then Shane asks them to pick a category of song: pop, say, or glam rock, or TV theme tunes; we're talking crowd-pleasers, OK, so there's no Joy Division or anything. Then the in-house band starts playing, the lyrics come up on a big screen, and the contestant wails the song as cacophonously as possible while maintaining the beatific grin of the thuddingly stupid.

And then! Suddenly! The on-screen lyrics are whisked away! And the singer has to finish the next line FROM MEMORY! If they get every single word right, the pot increases and they proceed to the next round, eventually hitting a jackpot of £250,000. If a contstant gets it wrong, Shane leads them to a desolate, snowblown corner of the stage, commands them to get down on their knees and unloads a single bullet into the back of their head. The body is left in plain sight for the remainder of the programme as a warning to others of its kind: DON'T FORGET THE LYRICS!

Yet another superb episode of The Apprentice (Wed, 9pm, BBC1) last Wednesday, although for some reason no matter how many people Sir Alan ejects, it feels as though their overall number fails to dwindle. Two got the chop last week, and there's still eight of the bastards in there. Still, at least this means you can pick more than one favourite: for me, it's got to be Raef, Sara or Lucinda.

Them to win. Go them. Go them.

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.

Headmistress to the nation

Alan Sugar may be the boss, but Margaret Mountford, his quick-witted aide with the sharp tongue, is proving to be the real star of The Apprentice, says Anna Pickard...

In the quietened boardroom, three great minds are in hushed conversation, their greying heads tipped together. Sir Alan Sugar and his two sidekicks are puzzled by the Jewish candidate who didn't know what a kosher chicken was. "But he's clever, isn't he? Didn't he go to Edinburgh?" says one, Nick Hewer. "Well," weighs in the only woman in the room, and with a slight sneer. "I think Edinburgh isn't what it used to be." And with eight words, a city fell. Well, not quite fell, but certainly wondered what it had done to incur the wrath of Margaret Mountford.

The eminent Mountford is, to the outside eye, a bit-part player in the tremendously successful series The Apprentice. A formidable force in British business, she was born in Northern Ireland and read law at Girton College, Cambridge. Late in her career, she has found a fame she never expected as the UK's favourite disapproving headmistress. As one of the two aides to Sir Alan, she shadows the teams on their tasks, delivers the results to the boss and helps to decide who should stay and who be fired.

Clearly, then, a powerful, public figure. Will Edinburgh University be burning the library down, hanging up its mortar boards and calling it a day? "The University of Edinburgh is one of the UK's most successful and popular universities," replies a spokesman, by email. "It is regularly ranked among the top 50 universities in the world and is currently going through a period of unprecedented growth."

He would not be drawn further into a discussion on the devastating effect Mountford might have on future university statistics. But her withering putdown shows how integral she has become in a show watched by millions every week. As each series develops, the interplay between Sir Alan and his aides - who have both been working with the Amstrad overlord on normal, non-televised business projects for more than 20 years - has a kind of magic that no television producer could have been expecting.

The interplay between Hewer, Mountford and the contestants, meanwhile, often feels like a couple of university professors asked to teach a nursery-school class - or a pair of curious children given free rein to examine the scuttling of some tiny insects with a magnifying glass on a sunny day. While the candidates themselves beetle about performing their ludicrous tasks, the camera cuts to Mountford or Hewer providing a perfect reflection of whatever the audience happens to be thinking - whether it's an approving nod or a stare so fearsome you wonder that the victim doesn't burst into flames.

Mountford's signature look is the rolling of her eyes to heaven. Indeed, most of her loudest comments about the candidates are almost entirely nonverbal. The eye-rolling is frequently accompanied by a heartfelt sigh; in extremis, a sickened pursing of the lips. Her reaction to any act of stupidity is to drop her jaw in shock and amazement. Complete idiocy causes an additional flaring of the nostrils. As contestant Michael Sophocles celebrated his team's Singles' Day greetings cards having won the task - by dint of being the "least worst" product on offer - with whoops, shouts and air-punching, Mountford could not have looked more disgusted had he marched an army of water buffalo into the boardroom and asked them all to fart on cue.

But it's also Mountford's quick-witted plain-speaking nature that we love. Outside a pub, avoiding Sophocles' appalling Frank Sinatra impressions at his team's Italian-themed evening, she commented: "I'm not sure what has more cheese in it, the pizza or that racket." When high-cheek-boned but responsibility-shy Alex tried to avoid claims of having stepped back when asked to be deputy leader, scared of being blamed later, Margaret told the boss, and the world, with a snort: "You stepped so far back from it you were practically out the room."

You wonder how long her patience can last. As she heaves yet another sigh and drops her shoulders another weary inch, it seems unlikely that she would want to sign up for another series where her beloved world of high business is turned into a circus of shiny suits. However, the loss of Mountford would be a terrible blow to the series. She is our voice on screen, our bridge between the unbearable back-stabbing candidates and the real world. Without her, would we still make the leap?

Firm, fierce, witty and wise; aspirational, sensational and eminently sensible. Margaret Mountford, we salute you.

This lethal peepshow

Journalistic values are often revealed by attitude to foreign news. American television, for example, generally covers few events outside the states, and is even wary of giving airtime to wars fought by America overseas. And, as a rough rule, broadsheet papers will have four or five foreign pages, while red-tops allocate one or fewer.

Unusually, though, this week's Sun front pages have alternated between two foreign stories: the Burmese cyclone and the Austrian cellar scandal. Similar news judgment has been shown by most media organisations here and even in the United States, where the apprehension about events not directly involving Americans has been suspended, although perhaps more for the Austrian family than the dead in Burma. Yet a global village of news is creating not worldwide concern, but voyeurism, notes Mark Lawson.

Because the most common critique of national media is parochialism, this expansiveness of interest could be seen as an occasion for celebration. Traditionally, populist newspapers and broadcasters have applied a version of their attitude to the employment market and immigration to stories from far-flung parts: British stories for British readers. In contrast, the more expensive end of the news stand has implied a moral duty to be globally aware: no reader is an island.

Underlying both these approaches, however, is a judgment of relevance to the consumer several time-zones away. Mass-market outlets have favoured tales that have a direct effect on their consumers (prices, strikes, bombs, celebrities), while niche media prefer stories which, while directly irrelevant to their audience, are argued to make us better people for knowing about them. Widespread coverage of the 2008 American election, for instance, can be defended by either measure, as the participants are famous and the winner may preside over a recession or invasion that will significantly shape British days and the lives of almost everyone in a single-superpower world.

But by no imaginable checklist, other than gruesome prurience, is there any need for us to know so many details of what happened in Herr Fritzl's underground dungeon. Marshall McLuhan - the Canadian academic who prophesied the idea of the "global village", but died two decades before the web and 24-hour news proved his remarkable prescience - hoped that the collapse of boundaries would create a kind of universal human concern, in which, while looking at everyone else, we would also look out for them. But when an Austrian family tragedy becomes home news in the US and the UK, it can seem that the interchange of information has created not worldwide concern but global voyeurism.

The point of journalism is not just to show, but to tell: to explain what is going on. And yet the cellar story - and even the cyclone - are most likely to induce a feeling of impotent bewilderment in viewers. These are stories that can not be accommodated by any theory of god or government. In both cases, I have felt guilty about tuning in to such despairing data. The Austrian material made me wonder if a cinema-style system of age certification may soon have to be introduced for news.

At least the Burmese coverage has an effect beyond a lethal peepshow in the appeals for western charitable cash that are already appearing amid the coverage. This arrangement feels right: a sort of licence-fee for having witnessed this pain in a place that it usually ignored. The risk is that Austria and Burma - or future nations struck by flood or a psychopathic paterfamilias - become of interest simply because of the horrible fascination of their narratives, becoming genres in a schedule of entertainment: real-life horror and disaster movies. At worst, the media may become a version of British high street cuisine over the last 40 years, in which burgers and fish and chips have given way to a UN of food. And so readers of newspapers or viewers of TV news become internationalist snackers, feeding their morbid hunger with Chinese one day, Burmese the next, even occasionally prepared to give Austrian a go if it's really spicy stuff.

And concern for these countries is unlikely to become a habit as common as curry or chow mein. In the last few decades, Austria has appeared in the international media only with regard to men hiding young women in cellars and the possibility that certain of its politicians might be Nazis, with the two sorts of stories now linked by commentators who argue that the forms of Austrian notoriety are linked, with some of the country's men acting out a kink planted by the use of underground bunkers by both the Nazis and those hiding from them. This line of thought is clearly tempting, although most Britons would be unhappy if they switched on the television in Vienna to see a pundit using Fred West as an exemplar of the national attitude to family and sex.

McLuhan used the image of the world becoming a village because he wanted a metaphor for a community in which everyone knows each other's business. But, even in such a place, it's possible to get a reputation as a busybody or gossip. As long as we're rattling the charity tins, staring over the fence at drowned Burmese is fine. But, when it comes to the Austrian monster, sometimes, in the global village, we should mind our own business.

BBC sorry for keeping charity cash

The BBC today apologised for keeping £106,000 made from premium-rate phone calls on about two dozen shows that should have been given to charity. In the latest scandal to hit the television industry over phone-ins, the BBC also admitted that viewers of Making Your Mind Up, the BBC1 show that chose last year's UK entry for the Eurovision song contest, Scooch, were misled into voting before phone lines had opened. In that case, the BBC made £6,000 from ineligible calls that has also gone to charity.

The BBC Trust chairman, Sir Michael Lyons, today said that the money had now been repaid to charity, including interest totalling £123,000. The trust has also ordered the BBC to make an onscreen apology - the first time the corporation's governance and regulatory body has imposed such a sanction.

Lyons said the issue involved the BBC Worldwide subsidiary Audiocall, which provides premium-rate phone lines to many BBC shows. He added that about two dozen shows had been affected between October 2005 and September 2007, although he refused to name them. Lyons said new technology had since been introduced which meant the problem had been resolved.

The trust has asked the BBC director general, Mark Thompson, to look at disciplining a "handful" of staff. Lyons made it clear that senior staff within BBC Worldwide and the corporation did not know about the problem and nor did staff who worked on the affected programmes. He added that he did not know why staff at Audiocall did not report the issue.

Lyons said: "There is no legal impropriety but it is a failure in the behaviour of these staff and the BBC's own systems. It was a matter of serious misjudgment by a small number of people and a serious failing in how the BBC controls its PRS [premium-rate phone services] and its relationship with viewers and voters. These problems can't continue into the future and there are lessons to be learned and disciplinary action may take place amongst staff. There is no room for complacency here. This is an organisation intent on living by the highest standards in the industry."

These latest TV deception revelations follow the record £5.675m fine imposed on ITV yesterday by Ofcom over the commercial broadcaster's phone-in scandal. In an email to staff, Thompson described the situation as a "serious oversight". But he said there was "no evidence" of any "impropriety or intention to defraud", adding that the £106,000 represented only 1.3% of the approximately £8m raised for charity through BBC telephone votes during the relevant period.

"All the money has been paid to the charities involved, with interest," Thompson added. "The oversight has been remedied. Clearly, this must never be allowed to happen again." He said that while the new incidents were "disappointing", they were both "historical'. "We're confident that the measures we've put in place mean they won't happen again," Thompson added. "The whole BBC has made enormous progress on the topic of trust over the past nine months, a fact backed up by all of our surveys of the public themselves. We need to go on doing everything possible to restore fully the public's trust in us. But we've made real progress on that score, while delivering some spectacular creative successes and starting to make our vision of the BBC's future a reality."

Emerging from the dark but running from the light

Last night's TV reviewed: Midnight Man; Women in Black; Inside the Medieval Mind

Time was when every TV crime-solver had some easily identifiable little eccentricity. There was Ironside (stuck in a wheelchair), McCloud (really a cowboy), Kojak (bald, sucked lollipops, kept saying, "Who loves ya, baby?"). But with the rise of maverick cops and team-based crime dramas (Waking the Dead, CSI, NCIS, Law & Order...), the quirks got ironed out. Cracker (overweight, gambling addiction) was a late addition to the genre.

There are signs of a mild resurgence, though, but now, in keeping with the mood of the times, the quirks are psychological, neurotic. So, in recent years, we've had Monk, whose quirk is obsessive-compulsive disorder. And now, in Midnight Man (ITV), we get Max Raban, played by James Nesbitt. Max is an investigative journalist who also has a big problem. As one of his contacts, the only newspaperman who will condescend to talk to him, helpfully asked him, "What about your phobia? Be realistic, Max, disliking daylight is a slight handicap in any career, even journalism." There's quite a bit of this sort of helpfulness around. Raban's estranged wife, for example, tackled him about his condition. "It's called phengophobia (though it sounded like “finger-phobia”), or have you forgotten?" Forgotten? I'm flattered you think I might ever have known.

As quirks go, this one feels strained and seemingly superfluous to plot requirements. Max is a fox, basically, because he comes out at night to go through rubbish bins. Maybe he makes love loudly in other people's gardens at 3am, too - most journalists like to I think. I know I do. To be fair, though, it's quite nicely executed. On the one occasion in the first episode when Max actually did venture out by day, bundled up in shabby hat and rather effeminate shades, the camera caught him paralysed in a shaft of light. This lacked the force of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (in which vampires, on the odd occasions that they were forced into the sun, would scurry into the shade, smouldering around the edges), but it did the job.

Exposition, or the teasing out of a character’s back story without being too obvious about it, is a fascinating craft. Some scriptwriters will go to extraordinary lengths dotting in tiny touches of colour that eventually add up to the TV equivalent of a pointillist masterpiece. Then there are those such as David Kane, who, for Max Raban, seemed to say to hell with it, let’s just get all the people he knows to tell him lots of stuff he should know about himself already. Midnight Man was a drama that scoffed at subtlety and in some ways was the better for it. For Max was a man about to trip over a government conspiracy involving anti-terrorist death squads. And once that helter-skelter ride got underway the broad brush strokes ensured we knew exactly where we were in terms of the maverick good guy, and so could spend our time, like him, trying to figure out what the baddies were up to.

So it’s night-time, the city’s a horrible place, James Nesbitt’s stubble is bristling and he is rifling through bins looking grumpy. For one depressing second, it looked as if Midnight Man was going to be Murphy’s Law, the offcuts. This time Nesbitt is not a cynical, flawed, but fundamentally good policeman. He is a cynical, flawed, but fundamentally good journalist called Max. It’s strange to find journalist heroes on TV: they are rarely portrayed as seekers of truth, but rather scumbags. Max only roots through rubbish because his glittering career in words is (temporarily) over. He revealed his source in a government scandal, who killed herself. Ever since, to keep the cash flowing, he sends scandalous (and very literal) rubbish to his editor, who is more the amoral journo scum-bag we’re familiar with – wouldn’t it be terrible if journalists were ever portrayed as human beings?

And wouldn't it be great if only journalism was as exciting and easy as it was for Max. Having been tossed the bone by his editor pal, he was tailing a lap dancer who was meant to be having an affair with a Cabinet minister. They were conducting this affair, supposedly discreetly, in a mews house – except that the Cabinet minister opened the door and greeted his adulterous paramour with a hug and kiss in front of the cab driver. Among the rubbish, he found a handily discarded pregnancy-testing kit, and a mysterious piece of paper in Latin, with a reference to a headless man. Intuitively, Max tied the latter into the discovery of a headless corpse in London, a hunch amply confirmed when mysterious men in leather jackets, toting guns, started shadowing him. Despite everybody else's advice, he kept looking, and ended up at a right-wing think tank, Defence Concern, run by a slippery-looking Rupert Graves and his lovely, devoted assistant, Catherine McCormack. Implausibly, all the disparate stories and leads joined up to make one giant story. Why does television portray print journalism so lazily?

Fortunately for Max, dragging around half a ton of clichés didn’t seem to slow him down much. But then fate did intervene on his behalf rather a lot. Such as when a bunch of youths beat up the spook who was stalking him, and then sold the man’s phone and ID to him for 50 quid. Then to add to his luck, the head baddie came up and introduced himself in a café – which certainly saved Max the trouble of having to track him down. Max, in his floppy sunhat, asked people questions, got direct answers and great quotes. He bribed a lap dancer not with cash but a sandwich. No obfuscating police press officer for Max – the desk sergeant at the cop shop sung like a canary: “My inspector thinks it looks like one of those honour killings.”

But of course the death of a young man called Majid (was he Muslim?) wasn’t an honour killing; ITV wanted us to be educated, so we were treated to a worthy few minutes of a grieving family insisting that Majid wasn’t “a fanatic”. We hadn’t thought he was: he was a kid who was shot in the head after playing football. On the 'ead, Naneen! Off the 'ead, Naneen! It’s odd having a drama imputing a kind of bigotry on to its audience, a bigotry it didn’t hold. If, as the drama insisted, so many people of a certain group and political persuasion had been killed, a newspaper – many newspapers – would be investigating it. This was clearly another drama straining to say important, predictably crowd-pleasing things about our post 9/11 or 7/7 world: echoes of David Kelly’s suicide, Islamophobia and the encroachment of a police state were stirred in. There was a bizarre credence given to the conspiracy theories to which Max subscribed (and imparts to his daughter as bedtime stories): the State was killing people it sees as undesirable.

From here on, everything ran pretty much according to the book: Max got warned off by heavies, everybody told him he was wasting his time (no one wants to listen; if it was Woodward and Bernstein, maybe, but not Nesbitt), the security services and the Americans were vaguely implicated in some over-arching conspiracy, and the devoted assistant, despite her initial dismissals, began to suspect he was on to something. Max's big lead is having an affair with her married boss. “I’m in it for the sex, not the washing,” she trilled – such an egregious line confirmed that this was one of those dramas in which characters spoke and behaved in no way believably. We even got an old friend: the scene where she downloads information from a computer against the clock, as the baddie heads back towards his desk (cf Mission: Impossible, the recent Iron Man and every other episode of Spooks ever).

Right at the end, things perked up with the arrival of Reece Dinsdale, cold-eyed and charmless as ever, as the man behind all the gruesomeness: a government security man who reckons that a few headless corpses are a small price to pay to keep the public safe from terror. He made a call on his mobile, and next thing you knew, Max's missus was being shot through the head. The evil state assassins having ripped off the same technique as Javier Bardem’s lumbering killer in the Coen brothers’ brilliant movie No Country for Old Men, with guns that pump whooshingly quiet bullets into foreheads. You had to say that this was keeping the public safe as we usually understand it.

It is, you'll gather, nonsense knocked off from any number of conspiracy dramas, from Bird of Prey and Edge of Darkness in the Eighties to State of Play in this decade. The whole thing's as bonkers as a pair of amorous foxes in the garden. Still, if you accept its ridiculous plot Midnight Man is gripping (if only to see where the next credibility-stretching twist is going to come from) and no one does wry and tortured like the talented Nesbitt. It remains to be seen whether this can be sustained over two more episodes. I’m inclined to think that one hour in the frenetic but sadly predictable world of “trashmeister” Max will prove enough. But I’d be happy to be proved wrong, probably with a denouement that will surely see Nesbitt placed in danger in paralysing daylight. But I bet he’ll still file a first-class front page – and overcome his fingerphobia.

After my initial disappointment that Women in Black (BBC2) wasn't Men in Black but with chicks, I found it very interesting. Film-maker Amani Zain travelled to Yemen for the first in what promises to be an engrossing series exploring a largely overlooked side of Islamic culture, that of its women’s relationship with fashion and fun. Zain’s aim was to “show the world that Muslim women are not shapeless black blobs”, and in that she certainly succeeded. You get to shop a lot, at the souk and the lovely new mall. And back at home you get to hang out with the girls, do each other's hair and makeup, try on the things you bought at the souk. Thursday night is party night. That means making a special effort with the hair and makeup, getting lots of girls round, burning lots of incense, eating lots of chocolate cake. Oh, and getting totally wazzed off your baps on qat, a stimulant that makes you feel wildly euphoric, and which in many countries is considered to be a class A drug. It looks like a brilliant time. Who needs men?

Although no one could doubt the affection and admiration she felt for the traditional way of life in the female-only quarters of her uncle’s house in Yemen, at times Zain seemed too eager to point out how wonderful life is behind the veil while ignoring the disadvantages. Especially as she said herself she wouldn’t want to be there full-time. And one also had to wonder if for these particular Muslim women life was good because they were fortunate enough to be wealthy. Wouldn’t it have been interesting, for instance, to contrast their lives with that of the poor seamstress to whom Zain paid a pittance to make up a dress – from fabric on which our film-maker had happily splurged more than 40 times that amount?

So this is not a scholarly programme about women in Islam: it's more Glamour magazine, in fact. Amani's family is clearly not representative of most people in Yemen: she's the first to admit they're posh, they've got drivers and cooks, they can afford all the qat they can chew. But it is an honest picture of one woman's dual existence, and as an insider Amani gets access to things no outsider would. She's also funny. And very into clothes. Maybe a better title would have been something like, Oh My God, I Love Your Veil!

Inside the Medieval Mind rolled to an end last night, with Professor Robert Bartlett musing, at what these days counts as extreme length, on the grotesque inequalities and cruelties of medieval society, illustrated with lots of shots of fire, blood and threateningly coiled ropes, in blurry close-up. The illustrative imagery was often gorgeous, but unimaginative. The Black Death and Edward II's poker up the bum both got illustrated by clouds of blood floating in water, and the overall impression was that the big difference between the Middle Ages and the modern world is that they weren't very good at focusing their cameras.

The other thing I didn't like about this series was the readings from medieval texts. For some reason, these were done by the most flat-toned, dreary actors they could employ, when everybody knows that back then people spoke like Charlton Heston. But overall, Bartlett has been – or, rather, has been allowed to be – a tremendously thoughtful, provocative and entertaining guide to the period, and this has been one of the most enjoyably intelligent things I can remember in many years. It's like we've emerged from the Dark Ages.

ITV fined record £5.675m over phone-ins

ITV has been fined £5.675m by Ofcom over the "abuse" of premium-rate phone lines in a host of hit shows - nearly three times the previous record sanction against a UK broadcaster. Shows including Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway, Ant and Dec's Gameshow Marathon and Soapstar Superstar have all been penalised in Ofcom's fine for misleading viewers. In addition to the record fine, Ofcom has ordered ITV to broadcast six on-air apologies about its participation TV transgressions.

ITV was criticised by Ofcom for a "completely inadequate" compliance system for its premium rate phone-ins, while programme makers were accused by the regulator of having "totally disregarded" its broadcasting code. ITV1's I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! and People's Court were also found to have breached Ofcom's broadcasting codes, but no financial sanction was imposed on these programmes.

The chairman of Ofcom's content sanctions committee, Philip Graf, said: "ITV programme makers totally disregarded their own published terms and conditions and Ofcom codes. Further, there was a completely inadequate compliance system in place. The result was that millions of paying entrants were misled into believing they could fairly interact with some of ITV's most popular programmes." Ofcom added that the unprecedented level of the fine reflects not only the seriousness of ITV's failures but also their repeated nature.

The previous highest fine imposed by Ofcom was £2m on GMTV - which is 75% owned by ITV - in September 2007 for the breakfast broadcaster's own call TV scandal. This matched the £2m that ITV broadcaster Carlton was fined by TV regulators in 1998 for deception in its cocaine trade documentary The Connection.

I revealed last week that Ofcom was considering a fine of around £6m, but ITV was seeking to have the sanction limited to £4m. The Ofcom chief executive, Ed Richards, said: "This was a thorough set of investigations which uncovered institutionalised failure within ITV that enabled the broadcaster to make money from misconduct on mass audience programmes."

Ofcom's report reveals that the regulator has fined the offending shows and their programme-makers individual amounts. Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway, made by ITV company LWT, has been fined the most - £3m - for repeat offences over four years. On various dates between January 14 2003 and October 21 2006, Ofcom's damning investigation found the programme was in breach of its codes in three competitions within the programme - 'Grab the Ads', 'Jiggy Bank' and 'Win the Ads'.

In 'Jiggy Bank' - a competition during which viewers rang in to try to ride a giant pig to win cash - 107,807 calls and £76,000 of revenue were affected. The number of calls to Win the Ads affected was a huge 3.6 million. The offences included "selecting competition finalists before the telephone lines were announced as closed" and "selecting finalists on the basis of their suitability to be on television and where they lived - contrary to the broadcaster's own terms and conditions, which explicitly stated that entrants would be chosen randomly".

Ant & Dec's Gameshow Marathon, also made by LWT, has been fined £1.2m for offences carried out between September 17 and October 29 2005. Ofcom revealed that £2.4m worth of revenue on Gameshow had been affected and that ITV had taken this amount into account when donating £7.8m to charity earlier this year. The regulator found that on six occasions during the show's 'Prize Mountain' competition, winners were "selected based on their suitability to be on screen", rather than randomly. LWT was also unable to account for almost half of the competition entries.

In addition, ITV company Granada Television has been ordered to pay £1.2m for breaking rules over Soapstar Superstar phone-ins in January 2007. In one programme the production team ignored the viewers' vote and finalised results before the lines had closed. This resulted in the wrong participants being put forward for eviction and on a number of occasions the production team overrode the song choices voted for by viewers.

Ofcom's fine also included a sanction against ITV digital channel ITV2 +1. The service has been fined £275,000 for not telling viewers that interactive competitions had concluded on 28 separate occasions – meaning that "all [premium-rate phone-in] entries in these competitions had no chance of winning but were still charged". Also, on three occasions when repeating interactive dating programme Playdate, ITV did not point out that broadcasts were not live so people who rang in were still charged. The regulator also investigated allegations made about the 2005, 2006 and 2007 series of The X Factor, but found they did not breach its broadcasting code.

Ofcom's fine could have been much higher – estimates put the highest possible financial sanction at around £35m, based on a percentage of ITV qualifying revenues. However, the regulator said it came to its conclusion after noting that ITV had already donated the £7.8m sum to charity.

The ITV executive chairman, Michael Grade, said: "Ofcom's announcement today is an appropriate moment to restate ITV's unreserved apology to the public for breaches that took place between 2003 and January 2007. We welcome Ofcom's recognition of the 'wide ranging and timely' steps voluntarily undertaken by ITV. ITV has gone further than any other broadcaster in instigating an independent, systematic and comprehensive investigation into all allegations around premium-rate services in its programmes. We believe that Ofcom's scrutiny of the evidence we provided will reassure viewers and rebuild the public's trust in ITV. Since the publication of Deloitte's findings, ITV has totally re-engineered its editorial, compliance and training procedures to safeguard against any recurrence of such breaches of trust."

Grade went on: "We have also taken a number of disciplinary measures. Anyone working with or for ITV going forward is in no doubt of the standards expected and the consequences if they fall short. For anyone who cares about British broadcasting the Ofcom findings and the Deloitte review make for sorry reading. It is clear that these serious breaches of trust were evidence of gross editorial errors of judgement designed, mistakenly, to enhance the viewer experience. In no case is there evidence that there were any corrupt attempts to generate further revenues."

Ofcom's damning report into ITV's participation in the TV deception scandal also lambasted "omnipotent" executive producers and revealed that a senior executive had been informed of an "issue" with the voting system on Soapstar Superstar. The regulator's report also criticised ITV for not taking "significant" disciplinary action against individuals responsible for shows caught up in the scandal and for its "institutional failure" over programme compliance.

The regulator said junior members of the Soapstar Superstar production team had been "firmly sat upon" by more senior programme-makers when they tried to raise concerns about the manipulation of viewer voting. Ofcom also criticised the executive producer of Saturday Night Takeaway, accusing the unnamed individual of turning a blind eye to phone-in deception.

In the case of Soapstar Superstar, transgressions included the production team overriding the song choices voted for by viewers and closing voting lines early. "In particular, ITV's partnership director and controller of ITV interactive had been told an 'issue' had occurred in relation to the January 5 2007 episode of Soapstar Superstar, but had not probed further and questioned what exactly had occurred," Ofcom said.

ITV said that the ITV partnership director and controller of ITV interactive had "not actually been told what the issue was or, indeed, its magnitude or seriousness", but admitted that the incident should have been reported to senior management. The regulator did not name any of the individuals involved with the relevant ITV shows in its wide-ranging criticism, referring only to job titles. ITV today declined to confirm the identity of the individuals doing any of the senior production or executive jobs referred to by Ofcom.

"Ofcom was strongly of the view that Granada's and/or ITV's senior management ought to have been aware of the breaches that occurred," said the regulator in its adjudication against Soapstar Superstar, for which legal compliance is handled by ITV subsidiary Granada Television. The regulator added that that the executive and series producers of Soapstar Superstar had shown, on the nine occasions voting was manipulated, an "arrogant disdain for the votes viewers had paid to make".

Ofcom said the Soapstar Superstar producers had "deliberately and knowingly" finalised the viewer vote and "appeared to have overridden viewers' votes, despite the fact that concerns had been raised by more junior members of the production team". Junior members of the Soapstar Superstar production team had, ITV admitted, been "firmly sat upon" by the programme's producers, according to the regulator. "The producers had flouted the voting guidelines for their own purposes: either for reasons of expediency (to ensure that the vote was concluded in sufficient time) or to put forward particular contestants for the overnight eviction vote for their own reasons," the regulator said.

Ofcom added that the Soapstar Superstar producers' actions "evidenced a complete disregard for the programme's audience" which was "totally unacceptable and inexcusable". "For the programme makers to knowingly ignore the audience's votes in favour of their own decisions was inexcusable," the regulator said. "This showed their total contempt for ITV1's audience. Their actions ... were also absolutely reprehensible."

In its adjudication against Saturday Night Takeaway, for which legal compliance was carried out by ITV subsidiary LWT, Ofcom said that breaches of its broadcasting code had occurred because of "ITV's/LWT's institutionalised failure to ensure compliance". There had been "longstanding and systemic failures" in the way three of the show's competitions were run, according to the regulator.

Ofcom was also critical of the lack of disciplinary action taken against the Saturday Night Takeaway production team. "The financial penalty would have been at a substantially increased level had ITV not taken such wide-ranging action, although the committee noted that no significant disciplinary action had been taken against any ITV or LWT employee," the regulator said.

Ofcom was highly critical of the role of the executive producer on Saturday Night Takeaway, described at one point as "omnipotent", stating that was where "ultimate responsibility" for editorial compliance lay. "The executive producer was experienced and he was the most senior member of the production team," said Ofcom's sanctions committee in its ruling. "His deliberate actions (or, in some cases, awareness of deliberate actions taken by other, more junior members of the production team) resulted in breaches of the relevant codes and the audience being materially misled."

Ofcom said that all of the "power" relating to editorial decisions lay with the executive producer with "no management oversight or scrutiny or audit of his actions". ITV's compliance team is described as "reactive rather than proactive", with "no awareness of any issues that had arisen" resulting in a "wholly inadequate approach that was not fit for purpose". "Effectively, how the viewer interactive competitions were conducted was entirely within the control of the executive producer, who was 'omnipotent'," said Ofcom. "There had been no, or minimal, checks or balances on his absolute 'editorial sovereignty'."

Ofcom made identical criticisms about the culpability of the executive producers in its adjudication against Gameshow Marathon, for which LWT also handled legal compliance. Gameshow Marathon had two executive producers, one from ITV productions and one from Fremantle Media. However, editorial compliance responsibility for the series "pretty much" lay with ITV, according to the regulator. ITV said that it would now be "career threatening" for production staff to make mistakes in the area of viewer interactive competitions or voting.

Elsewhere, Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly are to return their 2005 people's choice British Comedy Award after an ITV investigation found that Catherine Tate should have won the mishandled premium rate phone vote for the prize. The presenting duo are said to be "completely appalled" by the error - which ITV said today it could not explain as it published the investigation into the botched British Comedy Awards phone-in.

City law firm Olswang's investigation, the results of which ITV has now passed to Ofcom, found that viewers were encouraged to carry on voting for the award at the December 2005 event even after it had already been presented to Ant and Dec. The main part of the awards show, which was produced for ITV by independent production company Michael Hurll Television, went out live on ITV1, but the broadcaster cut away from the event at 10.30pm to broadcast its news bulletin.

However, the awards carried on and were recorded to be broadcast "as live" once the news had finished. While the news was being broadcast, Ant and Dec were presented with the people's choice award for their Saturday Night Takeaway show, even though viewers had not been told this and were continuing to be allowed to vote. Indeed, throughout ITV's broadcast of the "as live" segment, viewers were encouraged to carry on voting even though the award had already been presented.

"This issue was not identified until the filming of the 'as live' part of the BCA 2005," the Olswang report published by ITV today said. "Steps to avoid this issue at that stage could have been taken, but were not." At the point the award was presented to Ant and Dec, the vote tally showed that Tate's self-titled BBC2 comedy show was in the lead and should have received the gong. In a statement, ITV said "insufficient evidence" was available in order "safely to conclude how or why this occurred".

However, the reason may have bizarrely been to placate Robbie Williams, who the ITV report said had agreed to attend the event and present a prize only if the recipients were Ant and Dec. "In addition to the people's choice award there were a series of awards determined by a jury," the report added. "Robbie Williams was invited to present an award. It was understood that he would be happy to present an award if the recipients were Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly. In order to ensure his attendance, this assurance was given albeit at a time when the winners of all the jury awards had been decided and Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly had not been selected [for an award]."

The report continued: "As such it was an assurance that could not legitimately have been guaranteed as the only award still to be decided was the people's choice award, the winner of which was then unknown and dependant upon the public vote. While it can be concluded that the assurance was given to ensure Robbie Williams' attendance to present an award, it can not be concluded that this was the reason why the wrong winner of the people's choice award was announced."

ITV said there was "no suggestion" that either Williams or Ant and Dec were "aware of any of these issues". A spokesman for Ant and Dec confirmed that the duo would return their award to ITV, although he added they would not be making any further comment. However, sources have said the presenters are "completely appalled" at the situation. "They would never want to win an award by these methods," a source added.

ITV plc, which launched the investigation in September last year, said it did not expect any further fine from Ofcom for the British Comedy Awards incident as it was not the compliance licensee for the programme. Legal compliance for the British Comedy Awards was the responsibility of Channel Television, the independent company that owns the ITV licence for the Channel Islands. Channel TV has launched its own investigation into the affair.

Michael Hurll Television again apologised for the incident, but also hit out at ITV for releasing the Olswang report on the same day Ofcom slapped a £5.675m fine on the commercial broadcaster. "Much confusion has been caused by the timing of the publication by ITV of Olswang's findings in the same hour as Ofcom announced ITV's record fine," the production company said in a statement. "The British Comedy Awards and its producers, MHTV, are not connected in any way with today's record fine or any of the programmes sanctioned by Ofcom. Naturally we are embarrassed and deeply apologetic that, through an acknowledged oversight, a mistake resulted in a relatively small number of viewers' votes not being counted."

MHTV added it was "frustrated" that it still did not have any "understanding of how this confusion arose", and that "nothing of material significance has been added to our original internal inquiry". "We are also disappointed that Olswang has not apparently been able to elicit more clarity or raw data from [phone services provider] Eckoh, on which to base their opinions," the company said. "We await with interest the outcome of the Ofcom initiated inquiry, with which we are naturally fully cooperating, and hope that today's events do not in any way inhibit its progress." MHTV added it had already donated the "few thousand pounds" it had earned through the ineligible phone votes to charity.


Further reading: Ofcom's full ruling

Nesbitt and Neeson set for Ulster drama

BBC2 has commissioned a major drama about the Troubles in Northern Ireland that will feature James Nesbitt, with Liam Neeson also being lined up for a starring role. The one-off piece, to be called Five Minutes of Heaven, will be set in Belfast and tell a dramatised version of the real life story of 17-year-old Alistair Little, a member of the Protestant Ulster Volunteer Force.

Little was convicted in 1975 and spent 12 years in prison for the murder of 19-year-old Catholic Jim Griffin in Lurgan. The murder was witnessed by the victim's 11-year-old brother, Joe, and the film will look at the impact of his sibling's death on him and his family.

Hollywood star Neeson is expected to confirm soon that he will play Little as a grown man, while Murphy's Law actor Nesbitt will portray Joe Griffin in adulthood. Both actors were born in Northern Ireland and have previously appeared in films about the province's troubled history.

Neeson starred in the 1996 movie Michael Collins, about the early 20th century IRA leader and founder of the Irish Free State, while Nesbitt took a lead role in the 2002 ITV film Bloody Sunday.

The new drama will be directed by German Oliver Hirschbiegel, whose movie Downfall, about Hitler's last days, was nominated for a best foreign film Oscar. Five Minutes of Heaven is being written by Guy Hibbert, who penned the 2004 Channel 4 television film about the Real IRA bomb that killed 29 people in Omagh.

Hibbert said: "The impact of the drama is stronger still, as the story is about two real people who stand up and say it the way it is. It was important to get their full permission and co-operation. I have created this drama in their image, using their words and reactions. Working separately with both Alistair and Joe on the fictional areas provided a unique way of telling this story and revealed there were no easy answers."

Patrick Spence, the head of BBC Drama Northern Ireland, which commissioned the film from independent producer Big Fish Films in association with Ruby Films, said: "Northern Ireland is a society emerging from conflict. We wanted to develop and produce a single film, which, in a responsible way, marks part of that transition. We have done this by recording powerful personal testimonies of the two individuals whose lives have been determined by the Troubles."

The film's producer, Stephen Wright, added: "This film is not about finding a resolution or a happy ending. What we are attempting to achieve, in a balanced way, is to create a place where both men can tell their individual stories." Filming is due to begin on the drama at the end of the month in Belfast, for broadcast on BBC2 later in the year.

Five Minutes of Heaven, which also received finance from Northern Ireland Screen, will be produced by Eoin O'Callaghan for Big Fish Films and Wright for the BBC. It will be executive produced by Spence and Paul Trijbits, whose credits include Bloody Sunday, The Wind that Shakes the Barley and Touching the Void; and Cameron McCracken for Pathe, which will also distribute the film outside the UK and Ireland. Five Minutes of Heaven was commissioned by Jane Tranter, the BBC controller of fiction, and Roly Keating, the BBC2 controller.

Fry warns against ghettoisation of the BBC

Broadcaster and writer Stephen Fry launched a passionate defence of the BBC last night, warning that "top slicing" the licence fee and "ghetto-ising" its programming could fatally undermine it. He also sounded a warning for BBC executives, accusing them of "incredible naivety" in believing they could control the distribution of programmes online.

Programmes distributed via the BBC's increasingly popular online iPlayer service are supposed to be viewable for a week only, and can be stored on a PC for up to 30 days. But Fry said that large numbers of viewers were bypassing the corporation's digital rights management software, and more would follow.

"There is this marvellous idea the iPlayer is secure. It's anything but secure," said Fry, host of the TV quiz show QI. His recent documentary on the Gutenberg printing press was one of the most popular programmes on the iPlayer catch-up service. "The BBC is throwing out really valuable content for free. It shows an incredible naivety about how the internet and digital devices work."

Fry admitted to bypassing the copy protection to transfer programmes to his Apple iPhone, and said the corporation's iPlayer was hurting its commercial rivals. "The BBC is making a lot of enemies giving away free programmes to an internet that everyone else is trying to monetise; at the moment it's relying on the fact you have to be slightly dorky to record from the iPlayer; but, believe me, that will change," he said. "It will soon be the work of a moment for my mother to get an iPlayer programme off her computer and on to her iPod, iPhone, or whatever device she chooses."

Fry, a self-confessed gadget fanatic, warned MPs and regulators against handing a percentage of the licence fee to Channel 4 to plug its claimed funding gap. Media regulator Ofcom recently proposed top slicing the licence fee as one possible way to keep plurality in public service broadcasting. But Fry said it was only by maintaining funding at current levels that the BBC could keep the breadth and reach to reach the entire population. He pointed to examples from his career, from Blackadder to his lauded documentary on manic depression, which would not have been made or had such an impact with any other broadcaster.

"I genuinely cannot see that the nation would benefit from a diminution of any part of the BBC's great whole." He warned of the alternative: "a ghetto-ised, balkanised electronic bookshop of the home; no stations, no network, just a narrowcast provider spitting out content on channels that fulfil some ghastly and wholly insulting demographic profile." He said his plea was "personal not professional". "Yes, I want to see Channel 4 secure, but I don't believe that the only way to save it is to reduce the BBC. We can afford what we decide we can afford."

Earlier this month Sir David Attenborough warned the BBC against squeezing out public service television by flooding the schedules with lifestyle shows and celebrity chefs. Fry called for a new remit for Channel 4, saying the broadcaster was "finding it hard not to descend to freak show documentaries"; it recently unveiled a vision it hopes will secure public money to plug a £150m funding gap. Fry was speaking in a series of lectures organised by the BBC to inform the debate over public service broadcasting, expected to result in a Communications Act before 2010.

Don't call us: the cult of the actress rock stars

Scarlett Johansson's decision to record an album, when she's barely started as a movie star, seems at first glance capricious. Making it a record of Tom Waits songs, with help from David Bowie, adds a thin veneer of credibility, though the "vanity project" stink remains strong. But the news that Minnie Driver, too, is releasing a second album, this time with alt.country's tarnished king Ryan Adams, and his band the Cardinals, helping out, along with Juliette Lewis's continuing, and very successful career-switch from actress to provoking punk-rock star, suggests a more substantial trend, writes Nick Hasted.

Johansson's album, Anywhere I Lay My Head, has been bolstered by production from TV On the Radio's David Sitek, fresh from working with critically adored bands such as Foals and Liars. Her presence at last year's Coachella, singing "Just Like Honey" with the reformed Jesus and Mary Chain before greedily soaking up the atmosphere backstage, and her cameo in a Dylan video, adds to her hipness by association.

In part this reflects how glamorous rock and movie stars' worlds seem to each other. The chance of any of these ageing male rock icons refusing the attentions of a young, blond, Hollywood actress must also be counted as slim. Johansson, though, sees a deeper connection, suggesting the roles of singing and acting can be interchangeable. "Some of my favourite vocalists are acting in themselves," she notes. "Music is often about bringing characters to life."

"The only problem," Uncut magazine points out reviewing Anywhere I Lay My Head, "is that Johansson, no matter how much double-tracking Sitek uses, can't really sing." In this, though, she echoes perhaps the most famous singing blond actress of them all, Marilyn Monroe. Monroe is the most complete example of how minor details such as vocal limitation can be transcended.

Of course, she existed in a different time, when actresses were regularly called upon to star in musicals, as she did with Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). Her breathy sexiness nevertheless reached a sort of apogee when singing "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" or, infamously, "Happy Birthday, Mr President", to her reputed lover JFK at a celebration of his 45th birthday. Bonnie Greer used her this year, in the Theatre Royal Stratford East's production of her play Marilyn and Ella, to explore the enmeshed longings of singers and actresses. In it, Monroe aches to be taken seriously as a jazz singer, and Ella Fitzgerald wants to break out of her black jazz-club ghetto, into the mainstream of the movies. Each perceives opportunities for credibility and seriousness in the other's existence, forging a lasting friendship.



Johansson and Lewis, growing up at a time when rock'n'roll is an omnipresent attraction no matter how focused one may be on acting classes, are exploring an updated version of the same desires. Johansson's lurking backstage among bands, and even singing with them to rock crowds, gives her a whiff of something more dangerous-seeming, earthy and direct than her long, isolated months on-set, even as musicians see her as a cinema-screen-sized, superhuman beauty, walking among them.

Lewis has taken things still further. Though she broke through in a notoriously uncomfortable scene in Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear (1991), as Nick Nolte's schoolgirl daughter, subtly molested by Robert De Niro's killer on a dolls-house stage-set, and followed it with punishing roles in the likes of Natural Born Killers (1994), Hollywood has finally left her unsatisfied. Playing a futuristic, PJ Harvey-singing grunge star in Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days (1995) showed her an exit. She has now all but abandoned acting to become lead singer in Juliette and the Licks.

Though this was initially assumed to be a sideshow, like the dreadful vanity bands of Keanu Reeves and others, early UK audiences soon found an actual catsuited movie star crowd-surfing over their outstretched hands at tiny club venues. Once they had gotten over the somewhat perverse thrill, it was obvious that Lewis was going all-out. Her second album, Four on the Floor (2006), saw Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl on drums, while Lewis's immersion in the proto-punk of the MC5 and the Stooges seemed viscerally real.

Driver sits somewhere between Johansson and Lewis. Part of the utterly obscure Milo Ross Band early in her career, as her life as a minor movie star has faltered, she has settled back into music. At 38, Hollywood's unforgiving sexism almost certainly dooms her to scrabbling for roles in future. But in winning over audiences at Texas's South by Southwest festival, or working seriously on tracks late at night in a New York City studio with Adams, such indignities can be ignored. She can think like an artist again, not a mannequin deemed past its prime.

It can work the other way, of course. Kylie Minogue's game, if not very good, turn as Charlene Mitchell in Neighbours was the highlight of an early acting career in Australia that included several feature films. But when she parlayed the soap's UK popularity into a career as a 60-million-selling pop star, her permanent, depthless grin as she modelled skimpy clothes through a succession of modestly risqué videos was entirely mannequin-like (albeit one who co-wrote a few songs). Returns to acting were either dismal (1994's Street Fighter saw her deemed "the worst actress in the English-speaking world" in the Washington Post) or dependent on her pop stardom, as with Moulin Rouge! (2001).

The traditional showbiz world of Marilyn and Ella, meanwhile, has re-emerged in the wake of American Idol and its ilk. The patina of rebellion and social challenge that attracted Lewis to rock'n'roll has been swamped by a revived idea of the pop star as all-round entertainer. This can be seen most clearly in R&B, where the likes of Rihanna stumble through off-Broadway musical set-pieces. Like their male hip-hop counterparts, these singers now also feel ready to meet Johansson and co halfway, by breaking into films.

Beyoncé Knowles is the best, and worst, example of why this can be an awful idea. Early roles, such as Mike Myers' blaxploitation-style sidekick in Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002), required little more than flashing a smile and some skin, which her videos made her well-versed in. The excruciating faux-Motown musical Dreamgirls (2007), however, in which she played a Diana Ross figure, starkly showed the limitations her singing always suggested.

The contrast between Madonna and Courtney Love, on this side of the actress-singer divide, is marked. Madonna bluffed her way through one film success (Desperately Seeking Susan [1985], in fact carried by Rosanna Arquette), and was a passable, Monroe-styled, femme fatale in her then-lover Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy (1990). Everything else has been a cumulative, career-long embarrassment of unerotic nudity and unexpressed humanity. Love, meanwhile, though a haphazard mess of an artist these days, gave everything she could find inside herself to her fine early albums with her band Hole, Pretty On the Inside (1991) and Live Through This (1994). This ability, the one Madonna and Knowles lack, let her roar through Milos Forman's Man on the Moon (1999).

The authenticity Love couldn't help expressing at her best is what actresses and singers seek in each other's worlds. It is what we can hear in Monroe's warm, breathy sex-singing. It is the reason Lewis tore down the cinema screen between herself and her audience and leapt into their arms, and Johansson stepped onto the stage at Coachella, and sang with two old Scottish punks. Other actors might do a stage-play. But the fumble towards talent they don't quite have, and another's art that seems more real, keeps the two-way traffic alive.

So the next question is: How does a girl born into a real-life of rock'n'roll soap opera (Sex! Drugs! Paternity tests!) make the reverse journey her into film and television? By becoming this year's hottest model and the star of her own reality TV show, that's how...

Daisy Lowe belongs to a very modern breed of London It-girl. It's a role you have to be born into suggests Alison Jane Reid. While their predecessors were the daughters of aristocrats – the Tara Palmer-Tompkinsons and Lady Victoria Herveys, whose pedigree was determined by how many acres their family owned in Gloucestershire and how closely related they were to the Queen – these days, it's more a question of rock'n'roll royalty than blue-blooded veins.

A quick inspection of the surnames of the current crop of girls-about-town is telling. From Peaches Geldof to Lizzie Jagger, Leah Wood to Kelly Osbourne, the latest generation to grace the gossip pages are more likely to have spent their early years on a tour bus with their rock-star parents than competing at pony-club gymkhanas.

Although Lowe's name may lack the instant wow factor of her starry peers, the 19-year-old model's genetic make-up has secured her place in the rock firmament. The eldest daughter of Pearl Lowe, the fashion designer and former singer with Britpop band Powder, and step-daughter of Supergrass drummer Danny Goffey, her indie Primrose Hill upbringing alone would have been enough to ensure vicarious celebrity status later in life.

In 2004, however, a DNA test which revealed that her biological father was not her mother's first husband, as she had previously believed, but Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale, placed Daisy at the centre of a real-life rock'n'roll soap opera. Old friends, Lowe and Rossdale had enjoyed a fling so brief in the late-1980s that neither suspected Daisy might be his child. A doting godfather to Daisy for 15 years, his reaction to the news, according to Pearl, was to sever all contact with the Lowes, seemingly ploughing his energies into saving his marriage to the American singer Gwen Stefani.

Although the subject remains strictly off-limits, it is hard not to interpret Lowe's fierce loyalty to step-dad Goffey as an indirect condemnation of Rossdale. "Danny is a brilliant dad," she says. "He is father to my brothers and sisters, who I never for a second think of as anything less than whole; I just think of them as my brothers and sisters. He will be there for me when no one else will. Plus, of course, he's a creative genius. I'm proud to call him my father."

It would be easy for Daisy, a supporting player in the media drama, to have remained exactly that, forever known as little more than Gavin Rossdale's love child. But like many It-girls before her, Lowe has greater aspirations than just being a socialite. "If I'm going to be famous, I want to be famous for doing something good – having talent," she declares. What sets her apart is that she actually looks likely to make good on that desire.

At the beginning of this year Lowe, a model in Britain from the age of 15, was signed by the powerful New York agency IMG, which looks after supermodels Giselle and Naomi Campbell – a reliable indication that international stardom is on the cards, since it is in the US that the major campaigns that will put her on billboards around the world are booked.

The producers of the upcoming BBC2 fly-on-the-wall documentary Class of 2008, which charts the early push for fame and fortune of a group of trendy young things, are similarly confident she has what it takes to become a huge star, which is why they have made Lowe the focus for the series.

While her fellow subjects look set to achieve considerable success, including Lowe's on-off boyfriend Will Cameron, lead singer of The Blondelles, it is clear who is the star of the show. (Her relationship with Cameron, incidentally, is very much on right now – despite recent tabloid stories suggesting Mark Ronson is more than just the good friend she claims.)

Lowe has already graced the catwalk for Chanel – hand-picked by Karl Lagerfeld, no less – and stepped into Kate Moss's stockings in a campaign for luxury lingerie brand Agent Provocateur. With her doll-like face, mussed-up hair and slender but curvy body, she strikes a unique balance ' between an edgy, catwalk-friendly look and a more commercial appeal that could see her do very well indeed.

Were it anyone but Lowe, the prospect of such fame and fortune at such a young age might be worrying, but it's hard to imagine anyone better equipped to deal with the inevitable circus that will surround her. Her own childhood provided ample preparation for dealing with the excesses of celebrity; after all, not many people can say they grew up in a house where Pete Doherty was once a lodger.

Regulars on the 1990s Britpop party scene, Pearl and Danny were part of the Primrose Hill set that included Kate Moss, Sadie Frost and Jude Law. At one stage they were dubbed "the Posh and Becks of the indie world", although it would be fair to say that they lived a little more dangerously than Mr and Mrs Beckham. In her recent autobiography, All That Glitters, Pearl describes her descent into cocaine and heroin addiction with incredible candour, recounting the day-to-day struggle of trying to hold things together and care for her three children.

During a particularly difficult period of depression following the birth of her third child, Frankie, Pearl describes Daisy as her "saviour" and recalls how, at 10 years old, Daisy would change the nappies of her younger siblings and warm bottles while her mother lay paralysed in bed.

While some children might have cracked under the strain and developed their own wild-child ways, Lowe's instinct took her in exactly the opposite direction as she assumed responsibility for keeping the family functioning as Pearl slowly fell apart. "The only way to rebel against my mother was to be totally normal," she explains. "There's a huge element of Saffy from Ab Fab in me – just because I always tried to be my mother's mother. Obviously, she takes huge care of me, but I always felt it was my duty to help her too, being the oldest, especially as she was doing drugs. She was always really depressed and I'd want to be there and help her."

Going against the grain of the chaotic, bohemian household, Lowe became ultra-practical and mature beyond her years. At seven she insisted on looking after the family passports on holiday, and at 13 she was more interested in being a forensic scientist than following either of her parents into show business. Even now she confesses that caring for others has become something of a reflex for her: "I've spent my whole life looking after my little brothers, I've got a really strong maternal instinct."

If it was a tough childhood, Lowe does not portray it that way. "I never took it as a burden," she says cheerily. Meanwhile, her devotion to her mother – who has now been clean for several years – is absolute: "She is an amazing ' mother. We steal each other's clothes and talk on the phone every day – she is my best friend. It's all about Danny and my mum; we are a very close family."

The close physical resemblance between mother and daughter is striking too, although Lowe is candid about why her mother never pursued a similar career in modelling: "She got too pudgy because she was always stoned!" she giggles.

When Pearl decamped to Hampshire to escape the temptations of the London party circuit, Daisy initially stayed with her grandparents to continue her studies at her old school. Bright and articulate, she excelled in chemistry and art and was predicted to get good A-levels, but the separation from Pearl proved too difficult, and she abandoned her education in favour of modelling. "I couldn't handle being away from her," she says. "I just felt lost, so lost. So, it was my ticket out of school. Of course I could go back any time. Modelling's not forever, is it?"

While it may not be forever, for the moment at least it seems that Lowe is enjoying the new world it is opening up for her. She describes the decision to leave boyfriend Will in London while she spends much of her time working in New York as "really hard". Nevertheless, there is a sense that Lowe is relishing the new-found freedom that has come with her own pad in the Big Apple's East Village, and that she is at last getting the chance to shed the adult concerns she has dealt with for so long and indulge herself like any other 19-year-old. "I love being able to eat what I want, go where I want and walk around naked and sing to myself without anyone telling me to shut up," she confesses.

There have already been some notable career highlights, too. A shoot with in-demand American photographer Steven Klein was particularly memorable. "He's so quiet – a tortured genius," she says admiringly. He returned the compliment by dying her blue for a shoot – giving her a life-threatening allergic reaction in the process – hanging her off a giant crane and making her jump into a tub of green slime, naked, in the dead of winter. Lowe doesn't seem to have minded: "I am up for anything with Steven – he makes me feel like a beautiful piece of art when I work with him; he sees things no one else sees."

But it was modelling for the grande dame of British fashion, Vivienne Westwood, that she enjoyed most of all. "She is a huge muse of mine," admits Lowe. "I've never seen a designer get so involved in a show before. She was running around with a make-up palette saying, 'You all look too similar' and putting random eyeshadow here and there. Then she ran around with the eyeliner going, 'Who wants a moustache?' She was just so full-on and creative."

Despite the glamour of it all, Lowe still seems to have her heart set on a quiet life. It is safe to say that she has no interest in living the itinerant rock-chick lifestyle that her mother once enjoyed; her one experience of touring with her boyfriend's band failed to ignite any passion for life on the road: "I've never been so ill in my entire life," she groans. "We were travelling around Germany and all there was to eat was schnitzels; I need vegetables and sleep."

Perhaps it's the effect of seeing her mother so happily settled in the countryside with her vegetable patch and ethical clothing range, or perhaps it's just that maternal instinct kicking in once again, but Lowe's ultimate ambitions are a world away from her current career path. At the top of the agenda seems to be marrying her boyfriend and having children. Lowe says that she fell for Cameron when he confessed that "he just wanted to be a really good dad".

So what, then, is this would-be homemaker doing stalking the catwalks of Paris and New York? "I want to have money so I can spend it having children," she says simply. "I want to have three or four and be a really good mother and make sure they have a really brilliant life with parents who are not struggling." It may not be very rock'n'roll, but it sounds like a nice plan.

Class of 2008, an eight-part series, begins on 17 May at 12.45pm on the BBC Switch zone on BBC2