Especially when student radio across the UK manages it perfectly well?

Unless you're Fusion, the much-lamented former Oxford student station, which - when asked to supply compliance recordings and having realised that they hadn't recorded the output for that particular day - attempted to fake a recording, failed miserably, and got what is still a record fine and ban for a student radio station. By the time I got to Oxford, the University was only just again getting to the stage where it was allowed a (very limited) license...

Jesus christ. Out of interest, how did they figure out it was a fake?

It was something to do with the news reports that they'd faked, or something. Can't remember the precise details, I'll see what I can find online.

Gah, I got it wrong on the previous post, though - it wasn't Fusion it was called back then, it was Oxygen.

Here's the official Ofcom story from '99 : http://www.ofcom.org.uk/static/archive/rau/newsroom/news-release/99/pr128.htm

What gets me is: why? Surely not providing tapes is going to get you into more trouble in the long run than providing them, and promising to do better next time miss, like stations always do (and nearly always get away with)?

Going off at a tangent, the main thing that pisses me off about Ofcom is that they have let ITV get away with murder - the murder of their own channel, you might say. I don't think the ITC would have let them, although perhaps I'm just viewing them through rose-tinted glasses, and the political pressures would have made it inevitable.

on the 8 March the management of the station broadcast the day's output as if it were a week earlier; fabricating programming live on-air and referring to the date incorrectly as 1 March.

That's a scam so hilarious it might just work. Except that it didn't.

I'm not sure why, but I've always been a regulatory nerd. For the couple of years before university, I used to near-religiously read the ASA and ITC sites, as well as send in complaints about adverts that I hated hoping that I might get someone fined for the mental damage they incurred on me. For some reason, my ridiculously exaggerated claims were often met with muted sarcasm.

This one time, someone complained about a Lara Croft advert, thinking that the gun holsters around her legs were the tops of her stockings and saying that it was too sexed-up to appear on the side of a bus, which amused me greatly. Sometimes the complaints say a lot about a person.

Ah, a regulatory nerd?

I recommend this, then James - a fascinating look at film censorship in Britain. I've been reading it recently, and it's fab.

I hate programmes that try to make entertainment by taking the piss out of people like that. It's no more than bullying.

But then again, I loved the stuff Chris Morris did, like Cake and the Andrew Morton interview on Blue Jam.

As a minor postscript to the Oxygen thing, I was just rooting through some CDs, and found a promo copy of Gorky's Zygotic Mynci's "Sweet Johnny" single, that I bought in Age Concern in Oxford a few months back. Funnily enough, it's got "Oxygen" written on the cover in marker pen... obviously they gave all their records away to charity shops when they got shut down!

The Oxygen story is quite funny. They told everyone at the station to give the date as a week earlier. Unfortunately they were subscribed to an external news feed, who reported that Stanley Kubrick died when he should have been very much alive on the day in question.

And apparently at the time it was the largest fine in British radio history, not just student radio.
£20,000 doesn't sound that much though, you would've thought a large commercial station would've been fined more at some stage...

I hate programmes that try to make entertainment by taking the piss out of people like that. It's no more than bullying.

Mr. Scott 'Cunt' Mills being one of the worst culprits of this. 'Flirt Divert' makes me so angry my head hurts.

Were you around when that happened, Andy? I arrived in 2001 (just as Altered was kicking off... or was it 2002 that that got going?), and it all happened in 1999, so I'm trying to work out how many years ahead of me you were...

I havem't got a problem with wind-up calls in general. My problem with this Kiss FM one is:

a) It went too far (more than Scott Mills does),
b) It's one thing winding someone up over a date - it's quite another winding someone up over their entire future career, and most importantly:
c) Anything that involves giving out people's *names*, so they can be identified - as happened in the Kiss FM case - Radio 1 always gets permission from the person on the receiving end before broadcast. I don't know if they do this for Flirt Divert, but it's notable that they *don't* give out names for that section, so they can't be identified. That was the main thing Kiss FM got fined for in this case - breaking privacy concerns.

Yeah, that's really dumb giving out people's names for a prank like that. I don't mind when they do certain pranks though e.g. when they had a conversation with someone just using sound clips from a show like Father Ted or Dwarf, that could sometimes yield funny results.

For me, the key difference between a good prank and a bad prank is the target - are they trying to make the target look stupid, or are they just being a bit silly? This is why Trigger Happy TV was twenty times better than Balls of Steel and all that shite - Dom Joly pausing an interview with Ken Livingstone to beat up a busker is infinitely better than waving a dildo in front of Kelly Osbourne or spraying Tom Cruise with a fucking trick microphone.

It's not a definite rule - for example, Brasseye does both of these things - but that's usually what I go by.

In Brasseye, though, I don't think the primary intention is to make the targets look stupid. They do look stupid, and maybe I'm wrong and Morris was just being childish, but to me, that's not why they're funny. To me, they're funny in the same way as much of The Day Today was funny - because it was dead-on parody. The point about those public information videos - although the paedophilia ones skirted pretty close to outright absurdity, and I refuse to believe that former Tomorrow's World hostess Philippa Forrester would be so technologically un-adept as to not spot the fakery, and Lineker looked well in on the joke - is that they are quite close in tone to the earnestness of "real" ones, and to me, that's why they work.

Still, though, much as I may try and claim the moral high ground, I will never, ever get tired of seeing Dr Fox saying "Now that's scientific fact. There's no real evidence to back it up, but it is scientific fact."... And I'll never get tired of seeing Bernard Manning made to look a pillock, either. Then again, I could be completely wrong. I can't see that "Nonce Sense" was designed for any other reason than to make Phil Collins look stupid, but still, I'm not sure that was always the main reason.

Incidentally, while we're on the subject, does anyone know if it's true that the guy being spoken to in the "You're a shrub rocketeer, you're the crazy world of Arthur Brown" etc. scene was an actual paedophile? I heard that once, but wasn't sure how true it was...

I think that Brasseye served a further purpose too - pointing out that public figures will read any old tat out, regardless of whether they believe it or trust it. This required making the celebrities look stupid, but there was a damn good reason for it. And you're right, the main joke *isn't* the celebs looking stupid, but it's a nice by-product of accurate parody and social comment.

Not sure about the shrub rocketeer man. There's an Easter Egg on the DVD with the focus group people, in which they're told there was one genuine paedophile in the programme, but that could be Morris winding them up. The main evidence for me is his line "it's just another form of racism" - I think that's a scripted punchline rather than a genuine response.

"But for heaven's sake, who's to say there's *going* to be a strong wind ?"

Seb, I matriculated in Sept 2000 so it was before my time, but obviously it was an issue when Tim was setting up eFusion at the end of our first year which became Altered Radio during our second year, sometime in 2002, I think.

You know, I never did get my twenty quid off Altered for Spiral Scratch winning the "Highest Ratings for an Evening Show" award in my third year... Bah.

Nicely dropped in there, Seb... ;)

http://www.offthetelly.co.uk/interviews/arthurmathews.htm

"Interestingly, Chris Morris interviewed a real paedophile at the end of the show, but everybody thought it was just an actor."