TV review: Dispatches, Celebs, Brands and Fake Fans

As revelations go, Dispatches' exclusive that advertisers study at the school of dark arts took the half-baked biscuit. Rather than fly a film crew to Bangladesh to 'click farms', where workers cook the (Face) books, Dispatches ought to have gone the whole hog.

Film-maker Chris Atkins should have flown to Greenland to discover there's not really a Father Christmas, or to the moon to prove it's not made of cheese. He should have visited Oddbins to report that Gazza has been banned from trolley dash competitions. Or he should have visited Iraq to report that mine fields are more dangerous than potato fields.

Fake Fans was a Sun 'Gotcha' programme. It was a dull, witless sting.

Journalism can be a force for good. And it can also be a redundant, self-serving excuse for infotainment.

Last night's Dispatches was the latter. It took the moral high road and told us this: 'Celebrities will endorse stuff for a few hundred quid.' Wowzers. Who'd have thought small time z-listers would surreptitiously endorse things for money? Isn't that, like, advertising?

Before its broadcast, the programme had caused a ruckus. ITV had accused its rival of shoddy journalism: which is a bit like Dr Crippen accusing Hannibal Lecter of being uncaring. Celebs, Brands and Fake Fans was like Heat, Now and Closer for TV. It was risible, vacuous, lowest-common-denominator trash.

Spending an hour pointing out the ease with which Facebook, YouTube and similar platforms can be fixed was an exercise in pointlessness.

We know that friends distort Ebay feedback or leave unreasonably praiseworthy reviews on Tripadvisor. And we know that Facebook and Twitter is open to abuse.

Last night's broadcast was back-of-a-fag-packet TV. It was the sort of show that seemed to have been cooked up during a creatively-barren mung bean lunch in a trendy Soho brasserie.

We learned this: firms can bulk buy popularity to distort their social media statistics, celebrities are targeted by brands so as to bask in reflected glory, advertisers have as much respect for codes of practice as Luis Suarez does for his LFC contract.

Intellectually, Celebs, Brands and Fake Fans was woeful. It offered nothing that any media savvy undergraduate might not reasonably assume.

Its analysis was dumbed down, low brow and cheap rent. Yes, we learned that companies can buy comments, shares and likes. But we did not learn the extent of the disingenuity.

Dispatches told us this: online communications are part of the communications industry but some communicators present a false impression. And that was it.

Curiously – and how post-modern is this – the social media response to the programme was more interesting and amusing than the programme itself. @nickie72 told Twitter 'if anyone wants to send me free stuff, I don't mind tweeting or facebooking about it'.

@LBQblog told us people building a fast audience on social audience was dodgy. @ibecharlie hit the nail on the head: 'if you didn't know celebs are paid to tweet things, you're ignorant, stupid and need to read a book'. @walshybhoy added that Facebook farming was an utterly pointless waste of money.

He could so easily have been describing last night's Dispatches.

Andy Richardson