According to the Daily Mail, Blue Peter admit ‘competition winners’ were child actors:
In the latest deception, children were asked to apply to the Blue Peter website for an opportunity to go to the show’s studios and interview Dead Ringers impersonator John Culshaw.
Six children were chosen, but after the show it emerged two had been picked from a local drama group to liven up the slot.
Each child was asked to come up with a question and joke with John Culshaw as he impersonated a number of celebrities.
It is understood that the show’s producers enlisted the help of the actors to make sure the item went according to plan.
“It would have been preferable not to have given viewers the impression that all the children in the item had contacted the programme through the website.”
“In recent months we’ve taken a number of measures to ensure we get these things completely right, including the introduction of special training, so that viewers can continue to have complete confidence in the programme.”
That last paragraph is revealing – it doesn’t say much for the BBC and its staff that they need to ‘take a number of measures’ and introduce ‘special training’ to ensure basic honesty when it comes to something as straightforward as not deceiving their viewers.
This story has also been covered by The Times, Blue Peter had child actors pose as viewers, The Telegraph, Blue Peter in new fake scandal over ‘viewers’ and the Grauniad, Blue Peter in third TV fakery row. Curiously, BBC Views Online went with the BBC’s defence of itself up front, Blue Peter plays down ‘fake’ row, whilst the story wasn’t mentioned at all on the BBC Ten O’Clock News, nor in what I saw of the One O’Clock or Six O’Clock News programmes.
After the first Blue Peter fakery incident, where an alleged phone line problem led to a visiting child posing as a competition winner, Mark Thompson blamed “blind panic on the studio floor“. That defence isn’t even plausible for the subsequent rigging of the vote to name a Blue Peter cat, nor this latest Blue Peter deception. Clearly there is something else at work other than ‘blind panic’.
Earlier this year the BBC ordered its staff to come clean about any other deceptions that they were aware of. In July the BBC claimed they had audited over a million hours of output going back to January 2005 and had uncovered six further instances of dishonesty, with the implication that six instances of cheating out of a million hours wasn’t too bad.
The reality is that the BBC’s ‘audit’ relied on the honesty of BBC staff to come forward and admit their dishonesty – hardly the most rigorous of investigatory techniques. The latest Blue Peter deception was revealed not by the BBC, but by one of the BBC’s child actors spilling the beans while chatting with one of the genuine competition winners. So much for the effectiveness of the BBC’s audit.
According to the Telegraph report:
Sources close to the programme said the child actors were contacted because the show had simply not received enough interesting questions from viewers.
…which, if true, sounds strange – that out of thousands of competition entries the BBC could find only four that were capable of being used on the show. Sufficiently strange that, without any further details about who won the competition and who the child actors were, would it be too much of a stretch to wonder if the real reason for selecting the fake competition winners was some kind of misguided attempt to ensure the winning group reflected the BBC’s idea of vibrant multicultural Britain? Call me a cynic, but given the political correctness of the BBC we all know and love, that wouldn’t be much of a surprise.
