It's not quite News... but is it?

Every evening when I get back from work I like to sit down to watch one of the few remaining shows on pre-primetime television for which you need more than one brain cell to follow: Eggheads.

Yet instead of Kevin, Daphne and the gang I see some non-entity and that Hallowe'en accessory Claudia bloody Winkleman. Am I going mad? Is my watch slow?

And then it begins to dawn on me.

Eggheads has been shelved to make way for an extended edition of that infernal, ubiquitous and ridiculous deadbrain-fodder, Strictly Come Dancing or, in popularspeak, simply "Strictly". What I see is akin to an extended newsflash - the sort of thing that would usually disrupt existing schedules - covering the "dramatic" exit by Jo Brand (sorry John Sergeant) from this pantomime. There's the face-to-face interviews, telephone interviews, "expert" analysis and post-mortem... It's as if somebody of note has died.

Is this what we have become? Is reality television so important? Have the mandarins at the BBC gone insane? Do they care more for the plebs than for the small minority who would tune in to watch one of their regular shows? Or do they really think that this non-story is a major event, something that is actually newsworthy?


Well apparently they do. (The above is an annotated snapshot of the BBC News homepage taken at 18:24 yesterday evening...)