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SOMETHIN' STUPID: Ant and Dec with Robbie Williams and the People's Choice award they received in 2005. The prize should have gone to Catherine Tate

FAKED phone-ins. Rigged award ceremonies. Cheating and scamming on a monumental scale. Welcome to ITV, where, it seems to me, the viewers are held in much the same sort of contempt that Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe holds his electorate.

No one's died, no one's got cancer but the Ofcom report into ITV's phone-in fixing scandal is still shocking: Catherine Tate cheated out of the People's Choice prize at the Comedy Awards which went instead to Ant and Dec, votes not counted in I'm A Celebrity. And millions in phone fees swindled out of people who thought their calls would be counted in competitions when they weren't.

Of course this report is not surprising if, like me, you've never subscribed to the cult of Ant and Dec, around whose over-hyped talents ITV's empire currently appears to be based.

I'm not blaming "wor lads" for the millions that were fleeced out of innocent viewers in their name. They say they didn't know their paymasters were rigging and exploiting their way round the studios and I believe them. And they never come across as personally greedy for money themselves. But I've never bought into the idea that they are a brilliant, talented phenomenon either, and worthy of all the fuss that surrounds them.

They're not Morecambe and Wise and they are not even The Likely Lads; they are a couple of Geordie lads made good, and good for them. But what's been done in their name has serious repercussions for TV talent who are not Ant and Dec.

Winning awards increases your viewer value. If your shows can be demonstrated to be wildly popular, you can presumably charge more money for the adverts that are screened during them.

And and Dec say they are "appalled" at what's gone on in their name. Again, I don't doubt it. But none of that excuses the fact that, as executive producers of Saturday Night Takeaway, they should have known what was going on and put a stop to it.

In what looked like an attempt to cover everyone's backside, ITV chairman Michael Grade described the executive producer job-title as a "vanity credit" when the heat started going on his golden boys last October.

It sounds like another take on the old "magic of television" pony that the TV companies have put out for years. And if that's the way they view it then I think we can expect plenty more contempt in the years to come.

7:00pm Friday 9th May 2008

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