Robyn Roche is literally stumbling her way through her exercise video. She fumbles during step aerobics, entangles herself in jump-rope and trips all over her own words. Roche is no Jane Fonda.

No matter. Roche and her team can still turn a buck with the hapless video by licensing it to reality TV producers in search of humorous blooper footage. In this case, it's licensed three times, including to a Fox show called, appropriately enough, "Stupid Behavior Caught on Tape."

"Today, we're going to be jumping rope," Roche says while unspooling a knotted jump-rope. "Or at least untying one," jokes offscreen narrator Stacy Keach on the May 29 telecast.

Stupid? Definitely. But reality? Hardly.

Before some clever editing, the tape was merely a collection of staged bloopers, with Roche purposely taking falls choreographed by a director named George Bartko. And, Bartko claims, some employees at Nash Entertainment, the production company behind "Stupid Behavior Caught on Tape," might have known full well that they had licensed phony outtakes of an exercise video that was never to be.

"Reality producers don't care if it's fudged," Bartko says. "They're in dire need of content."

In fact, a viewing of the raw footage confirms that some involved with "Stupid Behavior Caught on Tape" weren't exactly diligent in verifying the authenticity of Roche's endeavor. Her "bloopers" tape shows her practicing her falls, handing a jump-rope to someone off-camera who returns it tied up in knots and even taking verbal instructions on how to look like a more natural klutz. This supposed caught-on-tape stupidity had actually been carefully orchestrated.

The incident, silly as it is, might foretell a problem in the caught-on-tape TV genre, where fast deadlines and not-so-fast governance has led to instances of faked reality. Considering that these blooper vignettes are entertaining only because they are purported to be real, one has to imagine that audiences for these shows will stick around only for as long as they remain happily ignorant that they are, in some cases, being duped.

In a high-rated show called "Caught on Tape!" that ran on Germany's RTL and is available domestically, one episode features a pizza chef who throws dough in the air but neglects to catch it. After scooping it off the floor he tops it with cheese and sauce and sticks it in the oven. The chef, who also appears as both an uncoordinated sandwich maker and a less-than-sanitary deliveryman in a couple of subsequent segments of "Caught on Tape!" is actually Andrew Roperto, a segment producer on the show. Asked about his star turns on "Caught on Tape!" Roperto charged that his bosses at GRB Entertainment instructed him, and others, to shoot and stage faked bloopers.

"It was worth millions of dollars," Roperto says. "The Germans said they weren't getting enough of what they wanted. They were very specific.

"This wasn't segment producers running around cheating. This was powerful people taking advantage of not-so-powerful people. They ordered us to do this. There's a clip that was shot right in the office. Right at GRB."

"Caught on Tape!" is described on GRB Entertainment's Web site as such: "No setups ... just real life; its foibles, blunders, bungles and gaffs ... all caught on tape."

One of the GRB executives Roperto claims was aware of the fakery is executive vp creative affairs Michael Branton, who disputes the claim.

"We're a reputable company that likes to make networks happy," Branton says. "If we faked shots, networks wouldn't be happy."

Producer Peter Zasuly denies that GRB told its segment producers to fake their own bloopers. But Zasuly and GRB Entertainment CEO and president Gary Benz both acknowledge a potential credibility problem with the genre, caused by a shortage of blooper supply to fill the demand.

"People have come to realize that if you have a great moment on tape, you can make some good money with that," Benz says. "Does that mean people might be moved to fake it? I've always heard of it."

Adds Zasuly: "It can be pretty difficult to find stuff. You tap your sources, then you run out. Eventually, everyone has seen everything, so you sit around waiting for new stuff. If you watch a lot of these shows, you see the same clips but each with a different spin."

Roperto, though, maintains he's being scapegoated. "I'm being disgraced in a disgraceful business," he says.

In the "Stupid Behavior Caught on Tape" exercise video, Nash Entertainment obtained the footage through Corbis, a stock footage company owned by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates. The company's John Brosnan says he recently learned the tape was a fake, though after it was licensed to Nash Entertainment.

But, claims Bartko, the tape's owner, "I didn't even pitch it as real."

Nash Entertainment even went the extra mile with an on-camera interview of Roche, who never suggested the falls she took were rehearsed.

"This woman, with a straight face, told us this happened," Nash Entertainment head Bruce Nash says. "What these people have done to us is reprehensible."

Roche declined to be interviewed for this report.

Nash says that perhaps only one person -- an editor no longer with the firm -- viewed the raw footage in its entirety. "He might not have been as diligent as he should have been," Nash concedes.

Nash Entertainment paid $1,200 to license the footage, plus $300 for the master tape and another $300 for an interview with Roche.

Eight episodes of "Stupid Behavior Caught on Tape" have been made; the most recent aired Sept. 4 on Fox.

The same raw exercise videotape also contains the makings of an instructional video for would-be barbers, whereby a teacher armed with a blade is constantly nicking the ear of her client. All faked, of course.

"Anybody who deceives the public ought to be thrown the hell out of this business," Nash says.

In fact, though, it's a fairly small industry, with those whose job it is to find and license clips simply moving from show to show. Roperto, the segment producer who starred in his own video in the show "Caught on Tape!" for GRB Entertainment, most recently worked on "Stupid Behavior Caught on Tape" for Nash Entertainment. And Bartko, the man behind the phony exercise video, briefly worked for Corbis, the company that licensed that footage to Nash Entertainment.

Industry insiders have long been aware of the fake-reality problem. None admit to knowingly licensing such product, though.

"We've all heard the stories," says Barry Poznick, a principal at Zoo Prods., maker of "Girls Behaving Badly" for Oxygen Media and "I Got Married at Spring Break" for MTV.

Poznick also tells of a producer -- not Roperto -- who appeared in his own hidden-camera show. "I showed it to others who were actually stunned," Poznick says. "What we do isn't brain surgery. Why fake it?"

Maybe because the popularity of caught-on-tape shows -- which can trace their roots back to "America's Funniest Home Videos," "Real TV" and even "Candid Camera" -- have created huge demand for suitably humorous content, which can be difficult to find. Entertaining real-life material is so scarce, in fact, that a producer in the industry nonchalantly refers to the licensing of the easier-to-obtain "mock reality" footage as if it were a common practice. "I was surprised there was even a term for it," Poznick says.

In a Bravo special that aired Monday called "The Reality of Reality: How Real Is Real?" a woman in the clip-show business says that she's worked shows where 75% of the footage is faked, "if not, maybe a little more."

Danny Wolf, who produced the fourth installment of the popular "Busted on the Job" series of the late 1990s, acknowledges that he allowed into a show a clip of a man having sex with a pinata, even though he questioned its legitimacy.

"I suspected it because it was so unusual and absurd," he says, adding he decided to use it because "it was so damn funny."

Wolf tells how he and a colleague organized a sting when they suspected that a Canadian private investigator was hawking fake blooper videos. They called the PI, explaining they were in desperate need of surveillance video they heard existing of a bartender in Canada who stirred a drink with his penis.

"We came up with a scenario that was so outrageous; we basically storyboarded it for him," Wolf recalls. "A few days go by, and he calls and says, 'Guess what? I found your video.'

"There's a PI in New York who does the same thing," Wolf says, describing two "surveillance" tapes he was sent that he believes were obviously phony: one of a baby sitter who lights a joint while seated on a couch next to a toddler and the other of an employee defecating on the desk of his boss.

Both, Wolf says, were shot with a handheld camera so they are obviously not surveillance tapes, and like the aerobics video, audible direction can be heard. "The guy obviously didn't check his tape before he sent it to us," Wolf says.

Further illustrating the smallness of the industry, Wolf is now at Nash Entertainment working on "Stupid Behavior Caught on Tape."

Even cops have been known to fake it for the cameras. Fox has acknowledged that in shows such as "World's Wildest Police Videos," dramatic caught-on-tape chases and arrests were actually re-creations with police officers playing the parts of criminals. And audiences were told they were watching "real cops, real crooks, real cases."

Then there was the case of the attacking elephant, where footage starring a stuntman was spliced into home video of an actual attack in order to beef up the dramatic effect.

But at least those who fudged the video of the elephant and police chases were re-creating actual events, whereas some in the business nowadays -- like the pizza chef and aerobics instructor -- are making stuff up from scratch.

"It's all about small production companies committing to networks, then realizing they haven't got enough stuff for an entire show," one producer says. "People who enjoy these shows are being lied to. They're the victims."