Champions hard to swallow

Got Talent: The Champions must have seemed like a surefire winner when first mooted. And perhaps if it had been restricted to just one show featuring all the previous British winners battling it out, that might have been the case.

Instead viewers have been subjected to an interminable procession of sword swallowers from Moldova, sand artists from Ukraine and – when I switched over briefly last weekend – a bird impressionist from Kazakhstan who sounded like a dove that’s just discovered its new owner is Ozzy Osbourne. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine what DavidWalliams would make of it, were he not being paid so handsomely by Simon Cowell to sit on the panel.

However, Cowell’s at least achieved a rare distinction: in BGT: The Champions he’s contrived to come up with the one thing that feels like it’s dragged on longer than Brexit.

written here in the past about how the plots of our TV soaps are now drearily issue-driven, punctuated ever more regularly by the sort of explosions and conflagrations that were once confined to the scripts of Die Hard and The Towering Inferno.

So it was gratifying to have that view backed by Radio 4 presenter and cultural critic Mark Lawson. He wrote: “Desperate to keep diminishing audiences interested,

the storyliners pile catastrophe after crisis on the best-known characters.” He added even more pertinently: “The frequency of sex crimes – many of the female characters in EastEnders have been raped at least once – is especially concerning.”

The stock response from the soaps is always about “raising awareness” – and certainly the shows feel a lot more like lectures than entertainment. No wonder the viewers are playing truant.