HOWZAT

Britain's largest commercial broadcaster said the Deloitte report found that serious editorial problems had been identified in three ITV programmes, including Soapstar Superstar 2007; Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway 2005 and 2006; and Ant and Dec's Gameshow Marathon 2005.

Mr Grade ordered a review by the accounting firm Deloitte after viewers were charged for competitions in which they had no chance of winning when some contests remained open even when a winner had already been selected.

One of ITV1’s most popular shows, The X Factor, opens its vote lines on Saturday and Mr Grade promised: “We are absolutely confident it will be clean as a whistle as a result of the Deloitte process.

“We expect massive voting this weekend. It’s the public appetite that drives this.”

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While premium-rate phone services have now returned to ITV, Mr Grade announced the immediate suspension of all SMS and red button voting during live shows.

“We are not satisfied that our providers can guarantee us that their systems are robust. Until we can get absolutely certainty that their systems can deliver what we need them to deliver, the suspension will remain,” he said.

Meanwhile, ITV plans to reduce its dependency on third-party providers for telephone services. The reimbursement scheme for viewers will be publicised on air by ITV and any money not claimed will be donated to charity.

Ant and Dec themselves said they had not been aware of the phone-in scandals.

The presenters - Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly - said they were “extremely disappointed” by what had happened.

McPartlin said: “We’d like to make it clear that we had no idea these problems existed.

“We have been fully supportive of this review and are extremely disappointed to discover that these irregularities have occurred.

“We fully support the changes that have been made within the programme as a result, and we’re 100 per cent behind ITV’s decision to reimburse all the viewers who were affected.”

Donnelly added: “The Saturday Night Takeaway viewers are of the utmost importance to us and although we had no direct involvement in the phone-line process, Ant and I are now reassured that strict measures have been put in place to ensure that these kind of incidents can never happen again.”

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