Stop the "TV cheats" madness!

News stories always come in waves, and TV has been no exception. It seems everywhere we’ve turned for the past few weeks, another tale has emerged of some TV programme falsifying something to pull the wool over the eyes of an unsuspecting public.

As with all journalistic fads, there’s usually one story that makes you stop and think, “right — that’s that genre done to death”. Now I thought it may have been the recent Blue Peter debacle — not that anyone should have been surprised on that score; after all, this is the TV show that replaced the ‘real’ Petra when the original puppy died off-screen; who denied Anita West a place in the programme’s list of past presenters until 1998; and who invented the phrase, “Here’s one I made earlier”, uttered by presenters during the famous ‘makes’ as they bring on a half-completed version that you know was made by someone else altogether.

But now, we have an altogether more banal story, that really shows that the bottom of the barrel is being scraped. The apparent crime?

Songs of Praise is recorded.

Yes. That’s pretty much the nub of it. Apparently, the Easter edition was recorded last year, double-banked with a Christmas edition from the same location. Different flowers and changes in lighting were used to avoid both editions looking too similar.

The Bishop of Lichfield says that, while the early recording was clearly not a “deliberate deceit” (gee, thanks, Bish), it would give an “air of unreality” to the programme. Which is only true if anybody believed that the smoothly executed broadcast from a different location each week actually went out live. Although I suppose that, given what miraculous events Christians celebrate at Easter, “BBC doesn’t mess up live outside broadcast” doesn’t seem quite so fantastical…

Now — while we’re on the subject of fictionalised versions of Songs of Praise, watch this video created by comedian Adam Buxton: