Saturday nights are going to be strictly anti-social
Cat fight! Cat fight! It’s mascara wands at dawn as
The X Factor bosses claim BBC apparatchiks have scheduled Strictly
Come Dancing to clash with the ITV talent-show behemoth.
It’s hard to care as we endeavour to enjoy the last few days of summer and pretend that school isn’t about to start. But care we should.
Fast forward a couple of months, when the evenings are drawing in and spontaneous dining al fresco is but a distant memory.
Then see just how important Saturday evening telly becomes – not just as a weekend highlight, but as an opiate of the under-15s.
Having to choose between arch panto villains Craig Revel Horwood and Simon Cowell is egregiously unfair.
It would take the wisdom of Solomon (Stacey, that is – sixth series, came third, do please keep up) to decide which to watch and which to record. Given few grown-ups know how to record anything since we gave up on videotapes, we really ought to get first dibs.
My bet is that we’ll end up having to watch the deluded simpletons plucked from major cities across the UK and allowed to perform, unwitting jesters at the court of Cowell.
And we will do this, grudgingly, because we love our grumpy children. But what does it say about the BBC that it wants to put us in this position?
I’m not by instinct a Beebbasher, but surely a corporation paid for by our licence fee ought to be guided by common sense and public spiritedness?
In a nutshell: splitting the peak audience makes for unnecessary family division on the sofa. And that endears the BBC to nobody.