THE BBC is embroiled in the TV phone vote scandal tonight after it emerged that it kept £106,000 it should have handed to charities.
The money, from premium-rate phone-ins, was not passed on to the likes of Children In Need, Comic Relief and the Fame Academy bursary, which helps young people break into the music industry.
Workers employed by the corporation’s commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, kept the cash and now it will be forced to make an on-air apology.
The money came from phone-ins on some of the BBC’s biggest hit shows.
More than 20 programmes, including the Eurovision Song Contest, have been been implicated in the latest scandal to engulf the corporation.
Last year’s BBC1 programme Eurovision: Making Your Mind Up was singled out. The show was hosted by one of the BBC’s highest-earning stars, Sir Terry Wogan, and ex-model Fearne Cotton.
Viewers were mistakenly encouraged to vote for the winner before phone lines had even opened.
In the event, the error did not affect the result of the contest, with pop band Scooch rightly being named winners.
It is a further embarrassment for a programme which saw Wogan mistakenly announce the wrong winner during the show, calling runner-up Cyndi the winner by mistake.
The BBC humiliation comes just a day after ITV was exposed for widespread phone frauds too. ITV was fined £5.67million after details of a major TV phone-in scam were made public.
The shock findings come from a report – published for the first time – ordered by the BBC Trust and its Director General, Mark Thompson, almost a year ago.
But tonight a BBC spokesman denied that the release of the report had been carefully timed to coincide with ITV’s own bad news.
The BBC Trust’s report says the phone frauds took place between 2005 and up to the end of 2007. But, like ITV’s report on Thursday, individuals are not implicated.
The BBC said the money had now been paid to the charities with interest added. But the BBC Trust admitted that £112,000 had been stashed away by its commercial arm, when it should have been given to charity.
Chairman Michael Lyons revealed that about £106,000 had come from the practices of its own phone-call management service, Audiocall, across many shows. This comes on top of the £6,000 that had been wrongly kept from some Eurovision phone calls.
The BBC Trust said that with the interest which had accumulated from the money, the total owed to charity was £123,000. Sir Michael issued a statement assuring BBC viewers that “all the money, including interest” had now been given to the charities affected.
He called the latest upset “unacceptable behaviour from a small number of staff”, and ordered BBC chiefs to broadcast on-air apologies. This is the first time the corporation’s governing and regulatory body has imposed such a sanction on its own staff.
“These problems can’t continue into the future and there are lessons to be learned and disciplinary action may take place among staff,” he said,
Media regulator Ofcom fined the BBC £50,000 last year for faking the winner of a Blue Peter phone-in.
Ofcom is investigating the current scandal and is expected to hit the BBC with a fine after viewers of Children In Need, Comic Relief and Sport Relief were duped.
ITV was fined by Ofcom on Thursday for cheating viewers out of millions of pounds, mostly during shows hosted by Ant and Dec.
The presenting duo could give up their lucrative contract with ITV, it emerged last night. Their shows, Saturday Night Takeaway and Gameshow Marathon, were implicated in the broadcaster’s phone-fixing scandal.
They are currently tied into a deal with the channel, rumoured to be worth up to £40million.
But the contract runs out next year and could, potentially, be broken early after the channel tarnished their reputation.
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