And the winner is….

Telephone companies.  A curious thing happened this weekend.  I found myself watching television – but apparently I needed a telephone to make the experience complete.   On both Saturday night and Sunday night the BBC and ITV were urging me to pick up the phone and vote for my favourite.  

The range of television shows where reaching for the telephone is mandatory is now breathtaking in its scope.  The obvious ones are the big hitters of peak time weekend viewing.  The insufferably smug Simon Cowell knows that there are millions of us out there prepared to pay through the nose to vote for this year’s nonentity.  But the BBC is hard at it too.  I managed to avoid voting for a breakfast show presenter (i.e. celebrity) dancing with a girl in something like a tinsel bikini by the simple mechanism of not watching it. 

But even I have become somewhat addicted to the laughable X-Factor – if only because it provides such excellent comedy. 

And whilst resisting the urge to vote for either a cute, but presumably very forgettable Geordie lad – or a cute and possibly slightly less forgettable Essex lad, we are given the unintentional hilarity of seeing a wonderfully pompous George Michael say his karaoke duet partner rose to the occasion.

That’s assuming you weren’t in a distinct minority watching some self-congratulatory sporting nonsense on the BBC.   Had I watched it, could I have resisted reaching for the phone to vote for a bloke who drives a car that every F1 driver could have won the world championship in this year, a bloke who hops, skips and jumps…a bloke nobody heard of until he avoided being hit by a pantomime giant in a boxing ring.

But it’s not just the peak viewing programmes.  The other day I was quietly enjoying the gadget show, which again makes excellent comedy when you realise that some of these idiots actually believe what they are saying about the useless ‘must-have’ gizmos on offer, when my chuckling was rudely interrupted with an invite to try and win a whole garage-load of items… if only I knew what date Christmas Day fell on – and was prepared to chance my arm with the telephone.

It was a similar tale on the following day when I found myself perplexed at the curious colour David Dickinson had gone on Dickinson’s Real Deals…only to have my musings interrupted with a blatant bribe.  A tenuous link between a ‘cheap as chips’ clock going for £500 and The Duke’s generosity in making  a competition prize of £5000 meant I would get  a juicy £5,000 if I reached for the phone.

 Which reminds me… now I know why my telephone bill is so high – I better pay it.