Tuesday January 16, 2007
MediaGuardian.co.uk
Most complained about programmes, 1991-2003
The scale and speed of the complaints about alleged racism on Celebrity Big Brother has just one precedent and demonstrates the importance of the internet in fomenting protest about TV shows.
Up until now, the biggest mass objection to a television broadcast on record remains for Jerry Springer: The Opera, shown on BBC2 back in January 2005.
Media regulator Ofcom received 8,860 complaints after the programme's transmission, of which 4,264 came through an organisation called the Premier Media Group. Before the show went out, the BBC fielded more than 50,000 complaints.
"The level was unprecedented for Ofcom or any previous broadcasting regulator and appears to have been the first large-scale internet campaign to Ofcom or any broadcasting regulator," the media watchdog said in a later ruling that cleared the BBC of breaching its broadcasting code.
There is no clear evidence yet that there has been a similarly concerted campaign to get viewers complaining about Shilpa Shetty's treatment by her fellow Celebrity Big Brother housemates.
However, given that Ofcom was reporting just 200 complaints last night and that this had swollen to 3,500 by lunchtime today - and another 1,000 were made to Channel 4 - it remains possible that there was an element of co-ordination.
In any case, email provides an easy way to register complaints and to advise others to follow suit, making large-scale protest a fact of life in modern broadcasting regulation.
Before Ofcom came into being at the end of 2003, the biggest protest on record was for Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, which garnered 1,554 complaints, most of them made before it was broadcast in 1995 on Channel 4.
The complaints against Scorsese's film were not upheld by Ofcom's predecessor, the Independent Television Commission.
Brass Eye's paedophilia special in 2001, also on Channel 4, is the next most controversial programme, with 992 complaints - though as many calls were registered in support of the satirical show. In that case, the ITC partly upheld viewers' protests.
This is not the first time a Big Brother series has provoked public ire. Last year, 2,635 viewers complained when evicted housemate Nikki Grahame was allowed back into the house, claiming they had been misled when paying to vote her out.
The premium-rate phone services watchdog, Icstis, ruled the reality show's phone voting system had broken its code of practice.
