Sherna Noah

TV presenters Ant and Dec yesterday handed back an award and ITV were hit with a record £5.67m fine as details of a huge TV phone-in scam were made public.

Sources close to the presenters said they were "completely appalled" and would be sending their award back to ITV.

A report into 2005's British Comedy Awards, published for the first time, revealed organisers promised pop star Robbie Williams he could present Ant and Dec with an award if he appeared. The report said the actual winner should have been The Catherine Tate Show.

Although the investigation did not find evidence to suggest the award was wrongly given to Ant and Dec to please the pop star, it was revealed viewers of the ITV show were asked to keep voting on premium rate lines even though the duo had already been filmed winning the People's Choice Award.

Catherine Tate's agent said the comedienne would not be making a comment.

The report states: "Robbie Williams was invited to present an award. It was understood that he would be happy to present an award if the recipients were Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly.

"In order to ensure his attendance, this assurance was given, albeit at a time when the winners of all the jury awards had been decided."

The report states there is no suggestion that Mr Williams or Ant and Dec were aware of "any of these issues".

The disclosure came as Ofcom slapped a record pen-alty on ITV for a spate of premium rate phone-in scandals concerning Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway, Ant and Dec's Gameshow Marathon and Soapstar Superstar.

Ofcom accused ITV of "institutional failure" and said the fine reflected "not only the seriousness of ITV's failures but also their repeated nature".

Programme-makers showed "total disregard" for the broadcasting code and the published terms and conditions of its competitions, it said. It has ordered ITV to broadcast a summary of the regulator's findings on six occasions.

Yesterday's penalty dwarfs the previous record of £2m against GMTV, which is 75% owned by ITV, and the £1.5m handed to Channel 4 over misconduct on Richard and Judy and Deal or No Deal.

The broadcaster made £7.8m from uncounted votes and some 10 million telephone calls were affected.

City firm Deloitte was called in by ITV to carry out an audit of its programmes and its findings were the subject of Ofcom's investigation.

It found that in Saturday Night Takeaway, competition entrants for the Jiggy Bank competition were not chosen at random but selected if they lived within an hour of a chosen location and would make good TV.

In Soapstar Superstar, votes for celebrities to be put up for eviction were ignored in favour of the production team's choice.

Ant and Dec said they had not been aware of the phone-in scandals, despite being credited as executive producers on Saturday Night Takeaway and Gameshow Marathon.

ITV1's I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!, People's Court and ITV Play were found to have breached the broadcasting codes. The broadcaster has pledged to refund £7.8m to viewers but it has only received £10,000 worth of claims. The rest will go to charity.

ITV chairman Michael Grade restated his "unreserved apology to the public". He said: "These serious breaches of trust were evidence of gross editorial errors of judgment designed, mistakenly, to enhance the viewer experience."

Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards said: "This was a thorough set of investigations which uncovered institutionalised failure within ITV."