Noel's House Party

I took that to mean that the graphics were only intended to accommodate five figures, and because the vote was so high it wouldn't fit.

And, as an aside - I always thought that those phone votes and the money received from them helped finance (or part finance) the prize pot for Grab A Grand.

Or was any cut diverted to the Children In Need slush fund?

I'm sure giving a cut to Children In Need started with Strictly.

There were a number of occasions on the gunge vote where both celebs ended up being gunged in some form. Again, can you imagine the fuss about people ringing in now? More innocent times.

Really enjoyed the series 1 videos - you can really sense a programme finding its feet and growing in confidence as the run goes on.

If you watch the end of series 1 you see Noel and DLT both got over 100'000 votes each.

If calls cost maximum 10p, would that just have been the admin costs charged by BT.

As others have said innocent times, thesedays the following week Noel would have to announce that everyone is able to claim their money back , and it would be a scandal splashed across the tabloids.

Pretty sure the entire "calls cost so much a minute/per call and x amount goes to <insert charity here>" thing started in the wake of the quiz show scandals.

Premium rate numbers were charged by the minute back in the day (God I feel old using that phrase ) and BT's minimum charge was probably 10p for them IIRC. There was also the more expensive 0898 numbers as well, used to be 48p a minute, and I think it was only those two well-known numbers that stick - there may have been others.

I think it was only when the numbers were moved to the 090x after either PhONEday or the later revision that the option became available to set the charges yourself.

But anyway, at 36p a minute for 0891 premium rate numbers, that's 0.6p a second. For the gunge vote it probably only needs a "thanks for calling, your vote is registered, see the result at the end of the show, goodbye" message, and for the call to cost 10p, message duration = shade under 16 seconds and I dare say it wasn't even that long.

So it's Bid TV with an audience and Noel Edmonds? XD

Sounds like they are trying to channel the old Swap Shop

Aren't/weren't premium rate numbers charged at a minimum of a minute anyway?

The minimum rate I'm sure was added later. An archive Usenet posting suggests it was simply always a flat rate up until the 0891 numbers were replaced. I'm happy to be proved wrong as always.

Some other archive postings on Usenet suggest the BBC may have been piggy-backing on somebody else's premium service to provide the viewer interactivity (House Party wasn't unique in its viewer calls-to-action by any stretch of the imagination, though it is more prominent as it was a live show - other shows like Going for Gold had its own viewer competition for example).

I spotted this on an old Usenet post from 1997, it probably isn't that far away from the situation in 1992 (the "rebate" appears to be what the company gets from the number - 22p kept by BT, the rest to them):



This suggests 1992 levels at 36p a minute, assuming the rebate was about 24p a minute, means the BBC at 10p a minute would have been either heavily loss making, shared/subsidised, or the difference has come out of the programme budget for what the end-of-show question revenue didn't cover.