Let’s Dance...them right off the show

The Beeb’s

is supposed to be funny – and some of it was.

Radio royalty Tony Blackburn and “Diddy” David Hamilton going full-on gangsta to Salt’n’pepa’s Push It? Funny.

Telly tart Ulrika Jonsson “demanding” cash to take part? Funny.

Judge Keith Lemon telling excricketer Darren Gough he looked like Terry Scott when he danced? Funny. And, weirdly, absolutely spot-on.

BBC1’S decision to appoint Alex and Steve Jones as presenters? Funny. But not funny ha-ha.

The Joneses – no relation, although they are both Welsh so spring from the same gene puddle – had the comic timing of Iran’s nuclear programme. But far less chemistry.

If laughter is a burning chip pan, these two are the damp tea towels. Every madcap moment was immediately smothered by their fake grins and forced banter.

The One Show’s Alex is often billed as the “girl next door”. The girl next door to what? An abattoir? A funeral parlour? One of those Welsh villages we flooded to supply Liverpool with tap water?

It must have been somewhere bloody depressing because that woman is a humour vacuum, crushing any banter with a confused “Riiiight...” and getting swiftly back to the autocue. Even the harrowing film of starving Africans was less painful to watch.

Why the BBC ditched Claudia Winkleman for Jones is a mystery. At least Winkleman would have known who Terry and June were!

As for Steve, he is a man who can only ever experience true joy in front of a mirror.

He did, however, provide one of the biggest laughs of the evening, albeit by mistake. When comic Terry Alderton, dressed as Tina Turner, jokingly asked him “to make an old woman very happy”, I can’t have been the only one to think: “He already has. He shagged Pamela Anderson.”