Until last Thursday, I was one of the few people in the country who had never seen Britain’s Got Talent. I’ve never seen The X-Factor or The Apprentice either – as the newspapers are always stuffed to the gills with stories about reality tv, I feel you don’t need to watch these programmes to know what’s going on in them. And in any case, I just can’t be bothered – my preferred method of wasting my time is to argue with complete strangers on the Internet.

But the mysteries of genetics are such that, whereas I struggle to watch three hours of tv a week, my daughter can watch that much before breakfast. And so it was that last Thursday, while we were enjoying a brief break at a hotel in Brighton, my daughter asked to watch BGT, and, for want of anything better to do, I agreed.

The first thing that surprised me was how dismal some of the acts were. A septuagenarian breakdancer? A grandfather/granddaughter singing act, only one half of which could sing in tune? A dancing dog? I knew BGT had a reputation for novelty acts, but this was the semi-final, for goodness’ sake.

The second surprising thing was how generous the judges were. I kept waiting for Simon Cowell to be mean to someone, and he wasn’t. Compared with Mickie Most in his New Faces heyday, the judges were pussycats (especially the bland-faced Amanda Holden who, puzzlingly, seems to be modelling herself on Betty Draper from Mad Men).

The whole business struck me as rather sad. It rapidly became clear that no self-respecting adult with an ounce of genuine talent would want anything to do with the show, which means that the acts fall into three categories:

• Novelties and freaks
•  Children (for whom self-respect is largely an alien concept, bless 'em)
•  Adults who are long past the age when they might have expected to become successful and are therefore desperate enough to throw all self-respect to the wind

Suggestions that you should therefore ban children or vulnerable people from taking part miss the point: if you excluded the very young and the psychologically damaged, all you’d have left is the dancing dog and the 73 year old breakdancer. And who’s going to watch that?*

 

* Lots of people, obviously. But not me.