I heard rumours about the reasons behind the fleecing of viewers a few months before the accountancy firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu released its investigation in 2007. Workers at ITV told me that the company was responding to years of disastrous management and the unstoppable rise of the BBC by organising as many premium-rate competitions as it could. Commissioning editors were basing the judgment on whether to approve a show on how many profitable phone-ins it could generate rather than its merits. As such, their behaviour struck me as crass rather than fraudulent.

But Deloitte taught me not to be so naïve. Between January 2003 and October 2006, Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway, produced by their private production company, had gone much further. It selected competition finalists before the telephone lines were closed — in other words, it allowed viewers to pay to join a competition they could not win. Even those in the competition were not chosen at random, Deloitte continued, but selected to appear on the show because they matched the producers' requirements. Michael Grade, the boss of ITV at the time, insisted that no venality had taken place. But no one expected the viewers to agree. The losers should have resented losing money in rigged contests. More ought to have lost their illusions about television. The production company for the apparently ordinary stars seemed to be
offering ordinary folk a fair chance of a moment's fame, while in fact they were vetting them. The affair recalled the quiz show scandals of the early years of American television, which ended with Congress investigating how producers fixed games so that popular contestants would keep winning prize money and stay on air. (Robert Redford made a film about the rigging, Quiz Show, which is still worth watching.) 

In America, the scandal changed the nature of television and high-paying quiz shows went off the air. In Britain, 50 years on, nothing happened. BBC people compare the insults heaped on Ross and Brand with indulgence shown to Ant and Dec, concluding that the rest of the media is out to get them. It is certainly true that even at liberal papers, editors who once supported the BBC now regard its dominance with alarm. But there is no evidence that media bias explains why viewers did not turn on Ant and Dec. On the contrary, almost as soon as the story broke, the viewers made it clear that they did not want to know about the dirt the media were offering. At the 2007 National Television Awards, voted on by the public, Ant and Dec shared the prize for most popular entertainment presenter, and Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway, the very show Deloitte indicted, won the most popular entertainment programme award. 

Their fans blocked out dissonant information which might spoil the picture of Ant and Dec as friends they could welcome into their homes, and did not speculate that if they were to behave in a similar manner they would not get off so lightly. The same is truer of Ross than protesting conservatives realise. His viewing figures have not suffered. His audience remains loyal, and from a commercial point of view the BBC's decision to keep him on has been justified.

The lenience shown to all three provides further evidence of how celebrities have become the aristocrats of our age. The attention devoted to the nobility on the newspaper society pages of the early 20th century has so shifted to celebs that I doubt that, beyond the members of the Royal Family, 99 per cent of citizens could recognise an aristocrat today. But the change in interest is not a full measure of the change in society. A true aristocracy not only defends its privileges but also persuades others not to question them. Ant and Dec have proved that today's aristos can abuse the gullible peasants, safe in the knowledge that the peasantry will not question their droit de
seigneur.