When compared to leaving lewd messages on the answer-phone of an aging actor describing how you fucked his granddaughter, I'm not sure 'outraged of Britian' have the energy to get angry about the rigging of the occasional phone-in competition any more. But media regulator OfCom do.
They have put Bauer's Kerrang! Radio on a warning after the station admitted that their breakfast show presenter, Tim Shaw, arranged for a friend to win tickets to the premiere of Rolling Stones film 'Shine A Light' back in April, and then played a pre-recorded phone call with the friend on his show, pretending the phone call was live.
Given all the hoo and haa about rigged and badly run phone-ins last year, you'd have to be pretty stupid to try and fix a competition in radio-land just at the moment, but that's what the Kerrang! breakfast show team did. The media regulator has put the station on "notice" in relation to the scam, and says that if any other such incidents are discovered they face a fine.
Bauer have already sacked Shaw over the incident, though he is now presenting weekend late nights on Absolute. To be fair to Shaw we should mention his defence. He argued that while he knew the rigged winner, he was a "loyal and deserving listener" who suffered from a chronic and debilitating illness and was a fan of the Rolling Stones, and therefore he felt he was "doing the right thing" by arranging for him to win the prize.
He's possibly right, though, given all the aforementioned hoo and haa, it probably would have been better to say so on air rather than pretending the winner had won a legitimate phone in quiz.
In its ruling on the matter, OfCom said yesterday: "However well-intentioned the presenter's intervention may have been in these particular circumstances, his decision to ensure a specific winner was not only in contravention of the competition's terms and conditions, but was also a serious breach of trust with the audience".
In the same OfCom report on recent radio shenanigans, the regulator upheld a complaint over a sketch on Scott Mills Radio 1 show in which random words are bleeped out of a piece of audio. The complaint centred on the bleeping of an un-random word - "fuck" - on the basis the bleeping wasn't satisfactory.
The OfCom report reads: "Ofcom noted that the beginning and end sounds of the 'bleeped' word were 'f' at the beginning, and a strong 'ck' after the 'bleep'. This was played twice and clearly - for all intents and purposes - sounded like the word 'fuck'. Ofcom research has demonstrated that the word 'fuck' and its derivatives are considered by most people as examples of the most offensive language. In this instance, the programme was broadcast at 4pm, during school holidays, and was therefore on air at a time when children were likely to be listening".
The regulator rejected the BBC's argument that the sketch "belongs to the saucy seaside postcard tradition of comedy, [rather] than to anything more offensive".