Whether it’s The Bill or Ashes to Ashes, police work, as seen on the telly, looks terribly exciting. There’s lots of running about, for a start, and in general terms the police seem pretty busy trying to catch criminals, of which there appear to be, in any given week, hundreds, thousands if you include Eighties daytime reruns and late night movies. It’s tiring just watching this stuff, so perhaps it is time for a slower-moving cop show, Snooze Squad, a brand new series in which a group of fraud investigators spend a lot of time looking at very complicated spreadsheets before going down the pub to do not very much. Tough work, but the graphics would be amazing.

Episode one follows a story of two well known showbusiness entertainers, who have the misfortune to front, and co-produce, programmes caught up in a series of phone-in scandals, where hapless viewers ring up to take part in competitions that they have no chance of winning. A brutal fine from the regulator follows and, rightly, people wonder what will happen next. Meanwhile over at Mi7, the double-top-secret fraud agency, police spend a lot of time reading Ofcom’s reports and, exhausted from the effort, spend the most of the rest of the programme comatose.

This may not be compelling television, but neither is snooker, and would it not be a compelling attempt to seek justice? Yet in the real world, members of the public believe that recent phone-in scandals amount to nothing less than fraud and there is public amazement that the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) appears reluctant to conduct an investigation. Such sloth is baffling the always beaverish Liberal Democrats, who have made formal complaints to the SFO and are pressing ministers about the absence of a police inquiry.

ITV, which has been at the centre of most of the phone-in scandals, has insisted that its producers and phone providers who did know what was going on were not in it for personal gain. This may be true, in the sense that they did not pocket any money directly, but bonus schemes at ITV did reward people for such things as profit at the company. which at one point was partly dependent on phone-in revenues. Now, that may not be anything like enough to prosecute a top executive, but who knows what more junior producers were up to.

And, anyway, why should we believe ITV in the first place? It would be nice if the police could get round to checking.

The other interesting question is this: how much did the presenters on the affected programmes know? Going back to last year’s Richard & Judy case, where phone lines were being closed early by an anonymous phone-in company before the votes were closed, it is unlikely that the presenters would have known.

Yet in some of the cases involving Ant and Dec, the phone-ins were part of the show and hence more obvious. Take the “Jiggy Bank” competition. The Bank — an enormous pig stuffed with pound coins — was going to a pre-determined part of the country each week, which meant that callers from elsewhere had no chance. Presenters may have known about that, although in this case there is no suggestion that Ant and Dec did. But it would be fun, arguably necessary, for the fraud squad actually to question household names.

Instead of police action on behalf of viewers, we have to read today that West Midlands Police and the Crown Prosecution Service have had to pay libel damages to Channel 4 after falsely accusing the broadcaster of distorting the views of Muslim preachers in an undercover documentary that exposed extremism in British mosques. To read of such a settlement is depressing. Why should the police pursue a broadcaster engaged in legitimate journalistic investigations? It would be better if the police tried to see if viewers had been defrauded as well as deceived; but instead it seems to be all Snooze Squad from here.

Merging Sunday with daily newspapers seems to be the vogue: last week Guardian Media Group confirmed that the hapless Observer would lose its separate news, sport and business teams. The Telegraph titles have been at this for a while, starting with business, although over at Victoria the whirligig is more brutal. While Guardian Media Group promises no redundancies, they seem to be a near-daily occurrence at the Telegraphs. Both groups talk of greater efficiencies, which means Sunday writers writing during the week, but with The Guardian and The Observer losing money and the Telegraph business highly geared, there are incentives to slash costs. It will be interesting to see what happens to the total number of journalists at each group over the next three years and whether Sunday titles can maintain their identity when journalists are shared.

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