Phone-In Game Show

"Come on! You only have 60 seconds left to call in for a shot at $100! All you have to do is unscramble this famous thing! "ALLTEHTORPES"! Keep ringing those phones! We don't have all night! Call! Call now! "

A Phone-In Game Show is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. It is a logical extension of the concept of a Home Participation Sweepstakes, except in this case, the whole show is one. These are a form of live Game Show where viewers can call in to a special number and hopefully get a chance to come on air to potentially win something by providing an answer to a question or logic puzzle. They were quite popular in Europe as a fixture of late-night television on commercial television channels, and even on dedicated quiz channels that dedicated their lineup to just this genre. If done right, they can at least be fun to watch, and leave you wondering if you should even phone in and give it a shot yourself!

Despite the allure these programs have to viewers, they're not without controversy. But why, you ask? The idea of a phone-in game show is pretty much a trope on its own, because practically every single phone-in quiz show on Earth follows the exact same series of events:
 * 1) Pose a question to the audience.
 * 2) Encourage people to phone in for a chance to win a prize by answering said question.
 * 3) Have the presenters pad things out with cheap talk and encouragement to keep calling in so you don't have to waste your precious airtime actually taking calls.
 * 4) Use a premium-rate phone number, so you can scrape money off callers. Offer an online entry form when legally required, but in any case, bury any of this important information in an Unreadable Disclaimer.
 * 5) Take few calls, or don't even take any! Hope they don't actually have the winning answers, especially if you made the question ridiculously hard or ridiculously easy.
 * 6) Wash, rinse, repeat.

Some politicians and regulatory organizations have asserted that despite appearing to be a game of skill, these programs are essentially a form of gambling since you need to pay to play (in most cases, serving as the main revenue source), and the odds of even getting on-air (or even getting the answer right for that matter) are quite slim. According to The Other Wiki. In late 2006, these concerns became the conduit for part of series of scandals in Britain surrounding the use of premium-rate lines on television as a whole. Complaints surfaced that Quiz Call producers had allegedly told its receptionists to completely ignore calls for a period (where they received 100 to 200 calls at 75p each), another show was accused of having their own staff posing as winning callers, and of course, the whole thing about those "impossible" questions.

At the first signs of the scandal, the damage had already been done: ITV shut down its all-games digital channel ITV Play (and suspended all use of premium-rate lines), Channel Five got fined £300,000 for having such a show coming up with a fake winner's name on a daytime phone-in game, Channel Four sold off its stake in Quiz Call (which folded at the start of 2007, but came back for a time on Five), and quiz channels became an endangered species in the UK altogether. Similar controversies have occurred elsewhere, though. In Belgium, a comedic consumer watchdog program (who, through a mess of Loophole Abuse, also accused a Belgium music royalty agency of collecting royalties for artists who don't even exist) actually managed to get one of their own undercover as the host of such a show, obtained information about mathematics puzzles they had been planning to use, and determined that 16% of the "correct" answers they had were completely wrong.

To note, there are far too many of these shows to count, so this page will mainly be general to the genre since they're all rather similar.


 * Bonus Round: Some of these shows offered bonus games to win jackpot prizes.
 * Carried by the Hosts: It's a given, since we're often dealing with cheap, late-night entertainment here.
 * Double the Dollars: Sometimes done as an incentive to "double the dialers"
 * Let's Just See What Would Have Happened: In the case of puzzles having more than one answer.
 * Personnel:
 * Game Show Host: Usually, one or more depending on the show.
 * Lovely Assistant: Often too.
 * Progressive Jackpot
 * Unexpectedly Obscure Answer: Played straight to the Nth degree. Is it any wonder why these shows are targeted by telecom regulators so often? You could probably do a whole section on them. So here are some notable ones:
 * Play TV Canada (which was produced in Budapest, by the same people responsible for one of the same name in Ireland, which also ended up being controversial) controversially threw this one at viewers: "4 girls are travelling on a bus. Each of them have 3 baskets, in each basket there are 4 cats. Each cat has 3 little kittens. How many legs are in the bus?"
 * During the British phone-in scandals, one complaint surfaced involving a show which named "rawlplugs" (a piece of hardware used to anchor a screw into a drywall or plaster wall) and "balaclava" as items a woman would keep in her handbag. Seriously?

- "...oh I'm so sorry, the answer we were looking for was "Leather Plots", popular retailer of fetish-themed grave decorations!"
 * Easier Than Easy/Harder Than Hard: In layman's terms: if the questions are easy, politicians will call it gambling. If the questions are hard, politicians will call it a scam.
 * Luck-Based Mission: It feels like one, but we can legally prove that it's not!
 * One-Episode Wonder: The Debbie King Show, aired by ITV Play, was a cross between a phone-in quiz and a news programme. Hosted by QuizMania's Debbie King, they still decided to go on with the show, even though ITV had announced earlier that day that the Play channel would be "suspended" as part of investigations into their use of premium-rate lines. Whoops.
 * Screwed by the Network: The 0898-gate scandals caused almost every single phone-in quiz game on-air in the United Kingdom to get affected in some way. Quite a few of them got either put on hiatus or cancelled.