“From the very beginning, our mission was to give consumers a voice.”
This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
As I was walking home from the supermarket with a bulging shopping bag in each hand, a white van pulled up alongside me. The young driver jumped out on to the pavement with his arms outstretched and shouted, “Rip Off Britain! I love that programme, it’s saved me so much money,” before giving me a bear hug.
With that, he got back in the van, waved to the traffic he had held up on the main road, and drove off.
His reaction might have been a bit over the top (it helps that I’m not of a nervous disposition!) but it’s not at all an uncommon response from the million plus viewers who regularly watch the consumer programme I present with Gloria Hunniford and Julia Somerville.
We first hit the air on BBC One at 9:15am in 2009, at a time when a whole slew of consumer problems and complaints – from dodgy builders and intransigent insurance companies to poor customer service – were commonplace.
In 15 years, what has changed? Today we are increasingly under siege from highly sophisticated scammers, fraudsters and blatant rip-off merchants. With a cost-of-living crisis and so much of our financial lives, from banking to shopping, online, it could be argued that consumer programming has never been more important.
From the very beginning, our mission was to give consumers a voice. Every item we feature comes directly from our viewers, who share with us the nightmare of having their identity stolen; of falling victim to a persuasive voice on the end of the telephone; of having their holidays and lives destroyed.
The heartbreaking human stories we tell from those who are brave and willing enough to recount their experience, and sometimes their embarrassment, enables us to act as a warning system to others to either avoid the same situation, or know how to deal with it.
We had a huge influence on last year’s decision by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to get banks to refund most, if not all, of the thousands scammed out of people in so-called authorised push payments – when scammers persuade people to move their money to supposedly “safe” accounts, claiming that it was under threat from hackers who have accessed their online accounts.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Those three little words, Rip Off Britain, have become incredibly powerful and persuasive. Just the mere mention of them to a reluctant company can usually produce a resolution and full compensation. That’s always incredibly gratifying to the team.
So how come such a valuable programme doesn’t command the spotlight and the bigger audience of a primetime slot? Why is consumer journalism absent from BBC prime time television, with Watchdog reduced to a single item once a week on The One Show, and consumer spots on Morning Live? Well, that’s the question we are constantly asked by loyal viewers.
Let’s face it, in the current economic climate where every penny counts, and consumers are more and more under threat from scams that rob them of their hard-earned cash, millions more could benefit from our expertise, advice and reputation. Indeed, when we do take over from The One Show at 7pm when they’re on holiday, our viewing figures treble. It’s one of the peculiarities of TV scheduling. We were conceived as a daytime programme, so that’s where we stay.
Fortunately, BBC iPlayer means you can be your own scheduler. Watch Rip Off Britain in your own primetime, at nine o’clock at night or three in the morning, whatever works for you. And while you might not be giving bear hugs, you, too, could be saying, “Rip Off Britain, you save us so much money”.
Watch Angela Rippon, Gloria Hunniford and Julia Somerville on Rip Off Britain, weekdays at 9:30am on BBC One.
Check out more of our Entertainment coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what’s on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.