Legal Research

Adult Chat?s continuing broadcasting joke

By scott

I have blogged before of how I suspected that Satellite Entertainment Limited (SEL) seem to have the same desire to have their broadcast licences revoked as was displayed by Bang Media, and proof of that is with us once again, in the latest Ofcom Broadcast Bulletin.

If you recall, SEL specialise in day-time chat and night-time ‘adult-chat’ programming ? which is where viewers are invited to contact onscreen (scantily clad and provocative) female presenters via premium rate telephony services. It is television at its most mind numbingly boring best.

Anyway, late last year Ofcom pulled SEL up for failing to provide recordings of its output, so Ofcom could assess whether of not the complaints made about the broadcaster’s output were merited or not, putting them in breach of their broadcast licenses, specifically condition 11 relating to the retention and production of recordings to Ofcom ?forthwith? if requested.

Having not learned from that lesson, Ofcom has now upheld a further four breaches on condition 11. This time SEL initially refused to supply the recording because it “wished Ofcom to respond to a number of questions about the validity of the complaints it had received and for information relating to the complainant, as had been previously requested. The Licensee also stated Ofcom had ?no lawful power to record any notice of breach unless and until Ofcom complies with its legal obligations?. The Licensee said it would await confirmation that Ofcom applied ?no pre-judgment to broadcast complaints prior to asking the broadcaster to provide tapes?.

Ofcom responded by saying they would indeed deal with these question when and if they decided there was a case to be answered with regards the complaints
But that to enable Ofcom to make an assessment of the content referred to in the complaint, the Licensee was required, under the terms of its broadcast licence, to provide the broadcast material requested by Ofcom ?forthwith?. There was no pre-negotiation clause in the Broadcast licence.

SEL then went quite and continued not to provide the recordings, leaving Ofcom with no option but to add more licence breaches to their account and announce that they would now be considering a statutory sanction (fine).

I predict that by June, SEL will have had their licences revoked, and by December another licensee in this sector will have also followed suit. As I have mentioned before, the whole point of the adult chat services, and their nature means that anyone watching from Ofcom could find code breaches every single day by all those broadcasting in the sector.

The stuff is ridiculously tame, and even your average 14 year old boy would have difficulty keeping interested. In many ways Ofcom should not be wasting their time with this rubbish. But. We in this country continue to have a perplexingly stupid attitude to sex ? with regards to its broadcast on television ? and as a result Ofcom is right here as it was right with Bang Babes in the action it is taking against broadcasters who are, quite frankly, just taking the piss.

However, we really need to look at this issue again at some point - and our ‘evidence based’ regulator need to show more balls (so to speak) next time around by backing that evidence, which it failed to do on the last occassion when it selectively ignored anything that said the world would not end if a more liberal attitude backed by encryption and PIN technologies etc could be taken - we have both, but to protect children from softcore porn.

Full post as published by Information Overload on January 24, 2011 (boomark / email).