BBC Watchdog Crash Auction

Our most recent auction at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel was eventful for more than just the bargains some of our customers walked away with.  A crew from BBC Watchdog crashed our auction and created quite a stir among the audience, who we can’t blame for being annoyed at the actions of the BBC crew who were clearly out to make a scene.  It’s fair to say we were unhappy with their behaviour.

Isn’t it a great shame that the BBC can’t be polite enough to ask if they can come into one of our auctions and objectively observe how we professionally conduct each auction.  If they do wish to attend an auction they’re very welcome to but what they shouldn’t do is stop us and our customers doing what we all come together to do and that’s do good business.

We regret that the BBC crew did need to be forcibly escorted off the premises but this was because they were unprepared to respect reasonable and legitimate requests for them to leave.  Our legal advisors tell us we’re perfectly within our rights to use reasonable force to remove people from our place of business, if they won’t leave of their own accord and clearly they weren’t going to.  On reflection it seems to us that the BBC Watchdog Team arrived specifically wishing to provoke a scene.

Six weeks ago we kicked off an initiative to gather objective feedback from as many auction attendees as we can.  We’ve been posting a summary of this feedback on this blog.  We’re very pleased with the extremely positive feedback we’ve received so far.  Sadly the BBC disrupting our latest auction resulted in us getting fewer than 30 survey’s completed because our staff were too occupied stopping the BBC crew from re-entering the auction room.  Their actions have made last week’s sample too small to be useful in an isolated week.  As a result we can’t introduce any tweaks to our operation for this coming week’s auction.  We’re disappointed!

Of course, there is no story in taking any notice of the many very positive comments we have collected from customers over the past 6 weeks.  The BBC are welcome to see all our survey results and the process we follow in collecting customer feedback but we don’t think they’ll be interested.  They only appear to be interested in sensationalism! We all know there’s no story for the BBC Watchdog Team in positive feedback!

We say to the BBC Watchdog Team, stop trying to make negative stories about isolated complaints that you haven’t bothered to research properly before then setting about to disrupt an auction room full of people who are looking for a bargain.  It seems the story for the BBC is the drama of their team crashing our auction rather than anything else.  It’s sad when this what investigative consumer journalism has stooped to! 

We’re resigned to the fact that if the BBC Watchdog team do make a piece for airing on their programme that it’s unlikely to be objective, balanced and fair.  Where’s the story in that?