IF I went round night after night mugging drunks and morons for a living, I'd soon be banged up in chokey.

Yet two of this country's national broadcasting institutions regularly fleece the inebriated and the underclass by dangling in front of their piggy eyes the carrot of big cash prizes that seem remarkably easy to win when, in reality, they'd have more chance of catching George Michael in bed with their wife. Unstoned.

I refer to those late night quiz shows that occupy the TV hours that Patrick Moore and the Open University used to inhabit, and the moronic quizzes that now seem compulsory for every single daytime programme. You know the kind of thing: "What colour is custard? Is it A: Princess Diana; B: Aardvark; or C: Yellow?

Even then I'm sure some sofabound scrotes think back to their schooldays and shout "Pink" at the telly.

Cheery Cheggers starts the day with a £10,000 giveaway, and from then on it's relentless. At night, the scam is even more insidious, with questions that wouldn't even test a remedial class of Welsh five-year-olds.

You may wonder how ITV and Channel 4 can afford to give away such huge amounts of dosh. It's simple. So profitable are these "quizzes" that the commercial channels are pocketing far more from this racket than they do from selling adverts. Literally millions and millions. It's scandalous.

I'm sure we've all been tempted.

I've known the answer to a Millionaire £500,000 tester; you've probably worked out that custard is yellow. Yet dialling that seductive number is about to cost both of us more than we reckoned.

You see, every time you phone in it costs you 75p or a pound. Not too bad in the daytime but at night, when you're desperately trying to get through to answer that desperately easy question, mashing the redial button means running up a massive bill. And you don't get through; you just get asked to leave your details.

And it still costs you.

It would be unfair of me not to record the fact that the TV companies have built in safeguards to protect the brain dead and gullible from themselves. If you look carefully at the tiny print at the bottom of the screen, you may just catch the information that says contestants are limited to 30 calls a day.

Thirty calls a day? At a pound a time? How good of them. You tell me how a tracksuit-clad, cudchewing, chain-smoking, pizzaeating, alcopop-swigging, singleparent baby machine in a council flat is supposed to be able to afford £30 a day on phone-in quizzes? And still score her weed for the weekend?

I'll tell you what's the greatest condemnation of this distasteful practice. Rupert Murdoch, reckoned by vast swathes of the British establishment, from far left to far right, to be the earthly manifestation of the Devil Incarnate, has refused to have such shameless swindles on his satellite stations. That, my friends, says it all.