“This is the latest ridiculous decision by the BBC – proof that something is going wrong at the broadcaster”. Is it someone swearing again, or BBC Worldwide getting too involved in commercial activities? Of course not – it’s about Strictly vs X Factor.

What a pointless dicussion this has become, but Hunt isn’t the only one who’s been lured in to commenting on it (although he’s definitely the one who should be most ashamed of himself, as you’d think he had more important things to discuss). Here comes national speaker of common sense and, it appears, Controller of ITV Simon Cowell, who under the not-at-all-melodramatic headline ‘The BBC has let Britain down’ writes in The Sun to say, “I’m happy to chair a meeting with someone from the BBC and someone from ITV and I genuinely think we can solve this within twenty minutes.” Thank God Simon’s here to sort things out. And for shame, here’s Declan Donnelly, who you’d hope would have the wit and perspective not to treat some scheduling issue as the end of the BBC, making an almighty leap of logic by suggesting, “This whole  business is sickening… the BBC are supposed to be a public service broadcaster and I don’t see much of the public service going on at the moment, which is a real shame.” That’s exactly what it is, Dec. Because Strictly has replaced Panorama and all news bulletins and… oh, hang on. No it hasn’t.

What a shame Dec has fallen for some shameless ITV spinning. It looks like the BBC is being blamed for all of this, when nobody’s pointed out that in previous weeks, The X Factor has begun at 7pm. This week, it was abruptly moved to 8pm, where the clash with Strictly has therefore become more pronounced. This is, of course, the same ITV that’s so concerned about what’s best for the viewer that it spent much of the last two years scheduling Emmerdale up against EastEnders every single week.

The Beeb have rightly pointed out that the two shows have actually gone up against each other on forty previous occasions. Sadly, because they didn’t do it last year, ITV have now been able to get away with muder because they don’t think anyone’s boring and pedantic enough to remember this, let alone go through old listings and point this out. But there’s nobody more boring and pedantic than me, so let’s take a look at some Saturday nights from 2005…

Saturday 22nd October – Strictly 6.15pm, The X Factor 6.15pm

Saturday 29th October – Strictly 6.35pm, The X Factor 6.15pm

Saturday 5th November – Strictly 6.35pm, The X Factor 6.15pm

Saturday 11th November – Strictly 6.20pm, The X Factor 6.50pm

Then we can also look at 2006…

Saturday 14th October – Strictly 5.50pm, The X Factor 5.50pm

Saturday 21st october – Strictly 5.45pm, The X Factor 5.45pm

Saturday 28th October – Strictly 5.40pm, The X Factor 5.45pm

Saturday 4th November – Strictly 5.45pm, The X Factor 5.45pm

And just to really hammer the point home, in 2007…

Saturday 6th October – Strictly 6.15pm, The X Factor 6.45pm

Saturday 20th October – Strictly 5.45pm, The X Factor 5.45pm

Saturday 27th October – Strictly 5.45pm, The X Factor 5.45pm

Now I don’t recall a grandstanding publicity-hungry MP feeling moved to comment on any of those occasions, possibly because ITV weren’t quite so desperate for ratings and publicity and feeding the papers a load of rubbish about the Beeb.

Regardless, the general point is that Strictly remains by far the better programme than The X Factor. For all the idea that Strictly‘s audience is elderly and boring compared to the hip young gunslingers watching ITV, Strictly is way more daring and innovative in terms of musical choices – they danced to the Kings of Leon on Friday night, after The Gossip and The Killers have been on the soundtrack in previous series, while The X Factor won’t feature anything that’s not on heavy rotation on Smooth FM. And in Brucie, we’ve got the most compelling and anarchic presenter on telly – whether it’s egging on the audience in an impromptu Vera Lynn singalong or repeating jokes (and letting the running order go to pot) until they get the laugh he feels they deserve, you can’t take your eyes off him. He really doesn’t give a toss. And, of course, he’s been in this business long enough to know that this type of scheduling war is not a new thing – what about when his Big Night went up against the Generation Game in 1978?

Funnily enough, The X Factor managed to beat Strictly in the ratings, after all ITV’s bleating, so what’s the betting we’ll see these arguments about “serving the public” quietly fade away over the next few weeks, and Cowell stop being quite so concerned about his mum, who apparently loves both?

Regardless of all the arguments, though, one thing is for certain – Jeremy Hunt is a complete idiot who has got far too much time on his hands and had been taken in by some complete guff from the ITV press office. Do some bloody work, man!

This is the week when The Bill moves to a new once-a-week 9pm slot, whereupon it upgrades to HD, a new title sequence and theme music. And to hammer that point home the channel have, confusingly, scheduled two episodes of the drama, running over Thursday and Friday.

In addition, it’s revealed that Coronation Street is to lose its traditional Wednesday at 7.30pm slot. Instead the soap will TX on Thursday nights at 8.30pm, while Emmerdale will screen two episodes also on Thursday, and its regular Tuesday hour-long episode will be cut back to 30 minutes.

An ITV spokesman said: “Coronation Street will make a move from Wednesday to Thursday nights on ITV1 from July 23 as part of a change to the schedule to reflect ITV’s contracts for the Champions League, FA Cup and England internationals, which will see ITV1’s live football broadcast on Wednesday evenings.  In addition, two separate episodes of Emmerdale will be broadcast on Thursdays from the same date.   We’re delighted that Thursday evenings on ITV1 will be a great showcase for soap from Weatherfield and the Woolpack.”

Later this year, The Bill will move to a permanent 9pm position. ITV explains that “a post watershed slot [will allow] for a grittier, action filled series in a more traditional home for terrestrial drama.”

Peter Fincham, ITV’s Director of Television said: “I’m delighted to announce The Bill’s transition to a weekly 9pm drama on ITV1. It’s a fantastic opportunity to take the series to another level, marking a new era for one of the most established brands on British television.”

Lorraine Heggessey, CEO, added: “This is a huge vote of confidence from ITV in the show and is a genuine first on UK television. We are incredibly proud of the show and we look forward to embracing the new opportunities this will bring.”

This week’s episode seems to have vanished, replaced – last night – with a jumble of unrelated, unexceptional programmes. Worse, next week the channel’s entire Monday night has been given over to… back-to-back Phoenix Nights!

There were only two episodes left in the series as well. I know More4 has always been loathe to treat the show with any respect, but this is, well, diabolical.

Saturday 12 January
3.05pm Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
5.45pm ITV News and weather
6pm All New You’ve Been Framed
6.30pm Harry Hill’s TV Burp
7pm Primeval
8pm Who Wants to be a Millionaire? Celebrity
9.05pm Thank God You’re Here
10.05pm Shaun of the Dead

Note, Thank God You’re Here, Paul Merton’s new improvisational comedy show based on an Australian series, is OTT’s tip to be axed after three weeks.

Sunday 13 January
3.30pm Lewis (repeat)
5.30pm Local news and weather
5.45pm ITV News and weather
6pm Dancing on Ice
8pm Heartbeat
9pm Dancing on Ice: The Skate Off
9.30pm Kingdom

So there you have it. Sunday looks particularly strong. I wonder what they’ll squeeze in once DOI drops down to hour-long episodes. Wild at Heart?

It’s ironic that Foster’s moaning about repeats given the only time he seems to show up in the media is to talk about the repeats on Christmas telly. Here he is doing it in 2006 and here he is doing it in 2003. And, as usual, it’s utter rubbish. On the day itself, BBC1 is all new from 1.30pm until 11.30pm, ITV1 is from 3pm to 9.30pm, and of the other channels, who cares? So BBC2 is showing Dad’s Army at 8pm on Christmas Day – that’s because everyone’s going to be watching EastEnders and Harry Hill’s TV Burp. What else are they going to do?

Of course repeats are going to be up if you include cartoons at 5am. Look at the programmes Foster cites as being repeated - The Snowman which is on at 2pm and Creature Comforts which is at 10.30am. If you’re going to be watching telly then, what do you expect?

Besides, it’s not as if the “golden age” of Christmas telly was any better. 1977 is always cited as the best ever Christmas Day line-up, but the prestigious post-Queen slot was filled by The Wizard of Oz, for the second time in two years, while before that was last year’s Are You Being Served? and the ancient National Velvet. Or what about 1991when BBC1 primetime was largely filled up with two utterly unfestive films?

Foster seems to be living in some sort of sitcom version of Christmas where The Great Escape is unspooled every Christmas night and the nation stands up for the Queen’s speech. Your dad comes up with more relevant and topical material after he’s downed five glasses of bucks fizz, and he’s not being paid for it.

In fact I’d heard that ITV2 were about to revive Streetmate, but I don’t know if this actually is it. There’s no mention of it in the credits, but this new series certainly shares some similarities with the old Davina-when-she-was-tolerable-fronted Channel 4 series.

It’s a simple format – each episode features someone looking for love, and Holly and Fearne gallivant across the country trying to find the perfect match. They each choose one person to meet the singleton at – cross-promotion ahoy! - Hell’s Kitchen, and the subject decides which one to have a fully-fledged dinner date with, and which out of Holly and Fearne has “won” that particular encounter.

It’s all harmless fun, of course, with nothing at all distinctive or unique about it – apart from the uniquely awful theme tune, a cover of Sowing the Seeds of Love by, of all people, one Richard Parfitt Jr. Nothing much happens at all, and bizarrely the actual date – surely the whole point of the programme – is virtually chucked away. The singleton decides which of the pair they like the best, we see about 10 seconds of their chit-chat and then we cut to the subject saying, “Yeah, I might see them again” or, “No, they’re not really my type”. And that’s it.

The general point to take from this, though, is that there’s room for three episodes of this on ITV1 this week, yet there’s no room for any new drama whatsoever. Aside from Corrie, Emmerdale and The Bill, there’s no new drama at all, which I find remarkable. 10 or 15 years ago, when the channel was dumping all over the Beeb, it would hardly go one night without a drama at 9pm. Now it’s going a week without any.

Instead we have Hell’s Kitchen seven nights a week. Now this may be one of the top reality shows (though I question why we’re getting a new series two and a half years after the last, and three and a half years since the last good one), but it’s a reality show, and that’s a genre which can be seen on hundreds of other channels from five to Sky One to Living to MTV. Whereas, ITV1 is one of the few channels that can afford and has a reputation in quality drama, and you’d think it would want to emphasise one of the genres it genuinely excels in.

Not surprisingly, every time Hell’s Kitchen has been screened opposite a drama on BBC1, it’s come off second best. Whereas the last time it showed a post-watershed drama, it was a huge success. The facts speak for themselves – if ITV1 are so desperate to pull in the ratings, it should screen drama at 9pm nine times out of 10. Why is this channel continually failing to play to its strengths?

Alright, so that only means it’s getting 650,000 viewers, compared to the 1.2 million people watching Katie and Peter on ITV2, but that still gets it into the digital TV top 10 and, apart from the adventures of Andre and Jordan, it’s the only show in that chart which isn’t a repeat or preview of an analogue show. I’d suggest the figures were pretty good for 11pm in the middle of summer on any channel.

It’s now seven years almost to the day that the series first made its debut on British TV, when Channel 4 screened it at the now unimaginable time of 6pm – the Simpsons slot, of course, and one it could still fill now as the amount of editing they’d need to do on Family Guy could see both shows fit in the same half-hour. Famously it was reprieved from the axe in the USA thanks to huge DVD sales, so it looks like on both sides of the Atlantic it’s a rare case of a series enjoying success purely through word of mouth.

As for the series itself, it’s certainly a rum affair, and one that in any five minute period can be both the best and the worst programme on television. Everyone mentions that most of an episode is generally endless variations on the same joke – “This is worse than the time I did X with Y” – but it has to be said that plenty of those bits are very funny (“Hi, I’m Fran Drescher!”).

The quality of the gags vary wildly, much of it is completely unintelligible to a British audience and parts of it (like last night’s “wrong-voiced Muppets”) are just disgusting. And yet, there are always loads of silly bits in it – Stewie dancing with Gene Kelly last week was a real high point – and it’s hugely refreshing to see a series that is only interested in sticking as many jokes into 22 minutes as possible. And Stewie and Brian are the best double-act on telly.

It seems that a growing number of people are finding that, if they want to give their brain a bit of time off, the best way to do that is to watch Family Guy.

The series that’s forever going to be referred to as “the new Nationwide” is back, possibly forever, on BBC1. Since that trial run last year, it’s got a new title sequence, a new – horrendous – theme tune and a new location, in a nice though rather echoey studio in London. There’s also no Nadia Sawalha, but hopes that the great Adrian Chiles would be co-ordinating the whole thing himself have been stymied as, at the last minute, Myleene Klass has been promoted from reporter to co-host. I’m not sure why, as she’s about to pop a sprog so she’ll only be on the sofa for a few weeks.

What hasn’t changed, though, is, alas, the same problem as affected the first attempt – basically, what’s the point? Features on the first show included tips on badger watching and a look at the Orkneys – both entertaining enough, but they looked like they’d just fallen out of Springwatch and Coast respectively. An item on second homes did at least have the bonus of a live link and some chat with “property developer” Martin Roberts (who’s got a bit dull since he used to review adventure holidays on The 8.15 From Manchester), but there was no reason for it to be on the programme on that day of any days or for any of it to be live. What we’ve basically got are all the programmes that used to be on at 7pm – the docusoaps, the nature shows, the consumer series – but now in 10 minute chunks.

Alright, so it isn’t Nationwide, and since that venerable series ended, most of what it used to do has now become a part of The Six O’Clock News - it’s no longer the case that the news is just a straight read of the headlines while any analysis or background is officially “current affairs” and the two never met. But that surely doesn’t mean that The One Show can’t be topical and a bit more relevant?

So let’s get Gordon Brown on answering questions from members of the public. Let’s give someone flooded out in Hull a camcorder to make a diary. Let’s find out how much it cost to stage the Tour de France in London. Let’s have Gabby Logan in on Friday to preview the weekend’s sport. Let’s have an alternative look at a big story that the news doesn’t have the time or inclination to cover.

Let’s just have something that would make anyone happily sit through that theme tune.

Lime Pictures’ most recent run of Grange Hill never actually made it to BBC1, after a screening on the CBBC Channel back in January. That’s the first in 30 years. Does it matter, though? I kind of think so. The show always felt like the heart of BBC1′s children’s programming, a dollop of grit and production prowess that off-set more frivilous fare. But, with the Corporation declaring programmes for younger viewers now really does mean younger viewers, I guess GH is outside that demographic. 

Surprised there hasn’t been a protest though – and I think the portents aren’t great for more series once the current agreement between the BBC and Lime expires. 

There is some better news, though.