Restricting product placement in this way is the kind of nanny-statism that’s completely defensible, and also preserves one of the most acute pleasures in British drama – watching someone go into the Queen Vic/Rover’s Return and ask for a pint of non-specifically branded lager. At least now they won’t be able to add: “And a packet of KP’s delicious new chilli-roasted nuts”. But how much further might the government end up modifying these rules? Will you be able to show someone eating a non-branded burger? Or perhaps only allow the most depraved villain to eat them, thus putting you off? What about showing real-life plastic surgery clinics, strip clubs, or any other area of potential moral ambiguity? If something that even a small portion of the British public find offensive is seen to be making financial gain during “our” shows, then the Ofcom switchboard should probably batten down the hatches.

But as well as the pact dooming broadcasters to a case-by-case assessment on what’s appropriate, product placement will inevitably damage our enjoyment of culture. The ideal is of persuasive placement that merely adds realism to a show, and functions on an unconscious level, but given the frequent lapses in sophistication in even the biggest Hollywood movies, we can’t expect the production crew of Emmerdale to position brands in an unobtrustive yet advertiser-friendly manner. Given the recent outcry from the gaming community about ingame advertising that Peter Walsh examined on these pages recently, we can expect a similar resistance to bullshit from TV viewers. Assuming that audiences with be blithe to product placement badly underestimates them.

The world of augmented reality, the process of adding interactive richness to existing environments like mobile phone interfaces, will also impact harshly upon TV programming via product placement. Claire Beal, writing in the Independent last week, considered the possibilities: “Imagine watching, say, an episode of Mad Men on your iPad, touching the screen when you see a jacket you like, and immediately being able to order it via an online store. At a stroke product placement becomes a measurable, transactionable and immensely more interesting proposition for advertisers and content creators alike.” And creates a sea change in the way we perceive and consume drama.

There’s something to be said for Beal’s vision – imagine the number of times you’ve lusted after a character’s wardrobe, or wanted to know the name of a song playing on the soundtrack – but would this choice inhibit the deep enjoyment we can get from drama? It becomes less a story and more a coathanger for a series of retail opportunities. And that’s without looking at the potential compromises in objectivity for documentaries, fashion shows, food programming and more.

The problem brings to light the curious trade we make when we watch television. The experience is the very definition of mediated – it comes via a television screen – and so to create the crucial feeling of immersion we have to get rid of anything that might remind us that it’s a construct. Advertisers would obviously argue here that brands strengthen the realism; but for the “realness” of a piece of TV to be created, you have to paradoxically create an unreality, portraying not the real world but “TV world” where real world commerce is banned. In a TV show, there is nothing for sale except itself, and that is a rare pleasure in the modern world, and we put up with, nay need, the awkward ordering of non-specific lager to keep it going. Adverts break the spell, but reanimate it a couple of minutes later; product placement disintegrates it throughout the show.

In the end, the only truly brilliant way to combine commerce and television is the unashamedly honest celebration of consumption that is the infomercial. We need less Pepsi cans lying conspicuously around a Hollyoaks set, and more of Mr. T saying things like: “My tastebuds is going wild… I love it when a plan comes together!”

They join RTL CEO Gerhard Zeiler this week in spouting tedious platitudes about how great British broadcasting is and how a merger would be, like, a pretty big deal. Ofcom reject top-slicing of the licence fee, i.e. giving some of the Beeb’s money to 4, which everyone was opposed to in all areas of the industry, so my heartrate isn’t exactly racing yet. They say that instead it should form a “second organisation alongside the BBC, with a sustainable economic model and with a strong public service role embedded at its core”, but they didn’t say who else would be in that model. And they proffer up such visionary insights as “While Channel 4 has played an important role and is valued by audiences, its current funding model is unlikely to be sustainable in the future”. Boring! But after 71 long pages, it gets a bit juicier.

The Guardian picks up on the fact that money from the digital switchover could go to 4 instead of some licence fee, but there’s some even more surprising stuff: after strengthening public service broadcasting (PSB) on this new merged channel, they say that ITV and Five could provide less PSB output. Rewind to last year, when ITV submitted a list of demands to Ofcom, and said that if the regulatory structure of their PSB output wasn’t changed as per the demands, they’d drop the PSB and become a fully commercial broadcaster. What they wanted included things like partnerships with the Beeb to provide news, “relaxation of all the regulatory obligations on Channel 3 with the exception of national, international and regional news provision”, “current affairs quota to 20 hours or less per year, out-of-London quota to no more than 10%, independent quota to the minimum European level of 10% and originated production quota reduced to a level no greater than that of the Channel 5 licence”. Or rather, “We can’t be arsed with it anymore.”

Thanks to the pressures of a much diminished TV advertising market, and the fact that their advertising model hasn’t adapted to broadband Britain yet, Ofcom sympathises with ITV having to make expensive PSB output. So they’re letting them get even more commercial and allowing them to drop some of their PSB output – namely regional news programming, which is dropping to just 4 hours a week. In addition 35% of their PSB content must come from outside of London, and they only need to run 50 minutes of current affairs programming a week. I’m sure they’ll find a way to count TV Burp as current affairs as well.

But wait. If Five and ITV don’t have to make regional news any more, and that which they do make may be partly funded by the BBC, does that mean BBC’s pretty-great-sounding BBC Local service is now in the clear? It was previously nixed by Ofcom for being too much of a threat to its competitors’ profits. Now, however, that might not be so much of a problem. In the report, Ofcom address the problem of local output getting ignored, mooting the possibility of a “Channel 6″ that would show local news and output all over the country, potentially with funding topped up by local authorities or central government.

Can’t think of anything more tedious than wall-to-wall local news coverage to be honest. Me and a friend were exchanging our favourite terrible local news headlines recently – she came up with ‘HOMELESS MAN STEALS APPLE’ in the Solihull News, while I offered ‘MAN PHOTOCOPIED’ BOY’S FACE’ in the Sheffield Star. I’m not at all surprised that ITV just wants to hang out in London making David Jason dramas.

The station fired Whale soon after the comments, but not soon enough for Ofcom – “TalkSport could and should have taken more action to ensure more robust compliance both before and on the date of [Whale's] broadcast”. TalkSport rather preposterously claimed they didn’t want the firing of Whale to affect the election outcome, rather than affecting their ratings from the crucial indignant-white-van market. 

Maybe the 20k is just what TalkSport needs to get it to stop hiring such slurry-mouthed goons. Whale’s place in the hall of infame is guaranteed after his Ken-bashing episode as well as his love of David “Beware the reptilian overlords” Icke, and he was joined this month by Sun columnist and fellow reactionary Middle-Englander Jon Gaunt. He called councillor Michael Stark a “health and safety Nazi”, after Stark had proposed that smokers shouldn’t foster children. Yeah, that ought to do it.

Also fondly remembered at TalkSport Towers is Tommy Boyd, former children’s TV presenter who was sacked after he let a caller rant on about how the royal family should be shot. Then there’s James H. Reeve, who TalkSport picked up after he’d got fired from Greater Manchester Radio for ”gratuitous use of racist language on and off-air”, thus pretty clearly outlining TalkSport’s hiring policies. And don’t forget Rod Lucas, who was fired after his name appeared on that leaked BNP members list, though he claimed he was only joined to help with research on his show. 

But perhaps the finest example is Mike Mendoza, who was suspended for a week in circumstances that would see you fired, from a cannon, in other lines of work. On the search for Madeline McCann, he mooted that :”Paedophiles in general are the type of people that surely would not follow football… not many gay people to the best of my knowledge are great football fans”. Gays and paedos – it’s easy to get them mixed up, isn’t it?

Luckily for those missing this delightful strain of broadcasting, Mendoza and Whale are together at last on Play Radio UK, Wednesday and Thursday evenings! Perhaps you could play a drinking game where you have to down a shot every time someone says “coloured”, “nancy”, “wind farm”, or “global government conspiracy”. Hope you’ve got a bucket handy!

Kip doesn’t work for Ofcom any more, but as Chairman of Ingenious Consulting, the consultancy arm of a company that also provides investment, venture capital and asset management to the media, telecoms and creative industries. Basically his guys go in and make everything better, in exchange for money. So we can presume that through him, Phorm can attempt to get itself a pretty wide client base in exactly the right areas.

More sketchy though is his paper “Public Service Broadcasting in the United Kingdom: A Longer Term View”, published this week by independent research unit the Social Market Foundation, with an intro by Greg Dyke. In it, the problems created by the financial crisis coupled with a broadband-enabled Britain are seen to create a situation where no-one wants to pay for anything, and that people will be able to choose exclusively whatever they want to watch online. Public Service Broadcasting (PSB), programming created for the public good like impartial news and quality drama, will have to adapt.

Meek and co-author Robin Foster propose that “key existing commercial players like ITV and Five should be given as much flexibility as possible to develop their commercial strategies”, ie not have to make any PSB output anymore. They also propose that Channel 4 be privatised, with the BBC acting as the core PSB provider while the others diversify their revenue streams to keep up. They mention spectrum access, getting the 1-5 channel spots, as being less of an incentive to have as the internet levels the playing field; therefore ITV for example won’t be persuaded to make PSB output merely by giving them the number 3 slot on the spectrum. And as everyone knows, ad revenue are down, so they’ll need “alternative sources of advertising”.

Bunch all this together with the fact that Meek is in bed with Phorm and we can presume that the advice to commercial broadcasters will soon be: don’t bother making PSB output anymore as only the BBC can afford to do that, and if you do want to, then get your money not from sticking Direct Line ads in daytime, but by getting personal information about your viewers off Phorm and advertising what they like back at them for a higher premium. Meek paints broadband as being full of “community and shared values”, and suggests that “ensuring access to high-speed broadband should play a much larger role” in spending from broadcasters. That’s because once everyone is signed up, Meek’s cosy community will be ripe for exploiting cash from via Phorm.

Is this the only way? It would be a cruel irony if it was necessary to give up civil liberties to keep Dispatches funded and on the air. Furthermore, giving up PSB creation to market forces is dangerous. Meek suggests “new media developments will allow a much wider range of perspectives and opinions to be accessed by citizens than ever was possible in the old world of four large highly regulated PSBs”, but in reality, it’s much cheaper to show reruns of American sitcoms than it is to commission truly public-service output. 

Even the licence fee doesn’t seem safe in Meek’s hands: “policy-makers should be working out now what its long-term future is and how it can be changed to respond to future public concerns – especially as we continue to move into a world in which consumers expect more choice and control over what they choose to consume and to pay for”. Yes, the internet will breed choice – but we have to try and avoid revenue models that reduce quality items to choose from, and that are in thrall to the advertiser rather than the producer.

The BBC announced in the summer that it wants to spend £68m on a network “hyper-local” news sites called BBC Local, providing 10 on-demand video news stories a day plus live feeds and other goodies. Faced by diminishing revenues, local newspapers and radio companies are opposing the plan because they’re not anywhere near as good, as are ITV, who didn’t think of it first. Well you’re in luck guys, because the BBC Trust chucked the plans out this morning. Ofcom decided that it would have reduced the revenues of rivals by 4%, and that wasn’t cricket.

The government were also naturally not happy about the prospect about lots of potential job losses, and so would have tried to intervene had the Trust passed the plans; Andy Burnham has the reserve power to do so, but was not sure if he could use it. Sounds like a storyline by Marvel.

So the BBC was in a very interesting position, where it could basically decide to shaft the UK media or not, and may or may not have been stopped by the government. What they were mooting was to postpone the plans until the economy (and advertising revenues) are healthy again, which simply highlights the impervious position the BBC were in. They’re scrapping BBC Local out of the goodness of their heart rather than being governed by market exigencies or law; Burnham said that he hoped the trust would “do the right thing”, which doesn’t sound like a man with a firm hold over the Beeb.

And shafted the local news would have been. Revenue from newspaper display advertising is forecast to drop 22%, classifieds 19%. A drop in circulation triggered by the BBC would send that even lower.

But is anyone going to miss local news as it is, and will Ofcom have done enough to save them? I admit that a loss of printed media in seriously deprived areas where broadband isn’t an option would be a serious problem, but let’s face it, audiovisual output by the likes of Johnston Press and other local news outlets is woeful. For just one example from many, check the school-play delivery with accompanying keyboard tapping sounds from our man at the Newcastle Chronicle:

One of the reasons why the BBC’s proposals were thrown out was because “it is clear from the evidence that, although licence fee payers want better regional and local services from the BBC, this proposal is unlikely to achieve what they want”. This stuff gets my inner Darwin a-raging. Surely it’ll be better than the above clown? Why is the BBC having to be held back in the face of deeply inferior product? Hopefully in more economically stable times coupled with broadband penetration becoming cheaper and ubiquitous, the BBC will get to launch something that will finally make local news bearable, and kill off the stale financial models of Johnston Press and co.