Ant and Dec in the clear, says Grade
One of the most controversial findings of today's Deloitte report into ITV's programmes that featuring premium rate interactivity (phone lines, text messages, etc.) involves the running of a competition on Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway involving a giant ride-on machine shaped like a pig, which also had a cash prize for the winner as well.
As mentioned on Channel 4 News tonight, participants were invited to call the show to be in with a chance to get the pig ride sent to their area as well as winning a cash prize, but the reality was that the planned location for the pig ride had been preselected and callers were screened to see if they lived there and were 'lively' enough to be featured in the programme.
Michael Grade claims that this deception is not serious enough to count as criminal fraud because it was only done to make the programme run smoothly, although he does acknowledge that it was a serious deception and callers will be refunded. And although Ofcom has refused to call the police, all of these issues certainly deserve further investigation.
Perhaps the most serious part of the pig ride deception was the selection of the winning caller based on their personality as opposed to the preselection of the area in question, since the odds of living in a preselected area were almost the same as being picked as a completely random caller out of thousands of participants, although both still count as deception.
Both Ant and Dec claim that they knew nothing about these deceptions (as well as others involving the Gameshow Marathon), even though they were both credited as being executive producers, although it's now claimed that the producer credit was included for vanity reasons only. (Another deception there then!)
Ant and Dec are both bright individuals who are 'hands-on' in their approach, so if they really were executive producers then it would have been fairly unlikely that they knew nothing about the deceptions, although since the subsequent claim is that they weren't really executive producers then Ant and Dec are much more likely to be innocent.
It would take a police investigation to independently verify this fact, and since Ant and Dec are widely regarded as ITV's hottest properties in terms of their on-stage presence and as a ratings draw, it comes as no surprise to learn that Michael Grade is trying to distance them further from this particular scandal even if their innocence claims are easily proven.
After all, both Ant and Dec could easily end up being the next Michael Barrymore, where a suspicion of guilt ends up overhanging them regardless of any subsequent events.
