Simon Cowell didn’t get all the column inches he was expecting this morning.

Roll out the big font for a last minute announcement

With The X Factor reaching its conclusion, the penultimate Strictly Come Dancing was rather less exciting, especially as I’m not really interested in any of the remaining contestants. Yet it managed to come up with the most bizarre piece of television this year (apart from when Brucie opened last week’s show by asking of the contestants, “Are they human, or are they dancers?”). That’s because after the phone lines were opened, it was spotted that there was a big problem.

After the judges’ scores, Lisa Snowdon and Rachel Stevens tied for first place, so got three points each, while Tom Chambers came second and got one point. This meant that it was impossible for Tom to avoid the dance-off, as no matter how many votes he got from the public, he’d still only end up with four points and would always be beaten by at least one of the other contestants. Hence it was a waste of time and money voting for him.

This all meant that 10 minutes before the scheduled end of the show, all gathered on the stage to learn that there would be no dance-off and all three would go through, and the show ended. Brilliantly, this meant that BBC1 had to fill ten minutes of prime time television with nothing but a stack of trailers, including some shown twice. Of course, the fact nobody had a clue what was going on was absolutely brilliant, the schedule just fell apart due to a complete cock-up.

However – and the comments box is there if I’m wrong – I think that even if it wasn’t a tie, Tom would always have been in the dance-off. The most he could have got was four points (one from the judges, three from the public). If Lisa came second and got the lowest number of votes, she’d have got three points (two from the judges, one for the public) but in this instance, Rachel would have had to have got five points (three from the judges, two from the public) and Tom would still have been in the dance-off. If the first-placed contestant had the lowest number of votes, however, it would have meant all the contestants tying with four points. There was no way Tom could have finished top of the leader board.

Clearly, with the low number of points floating around, there was always the chance there could have been such a deadlock. It would have made more sense to use the public votes alone in such a situation. Of course, in these days of transparency of television, it was probably the right decision to abandon the elimination, but it could have been avoided.

It’s great to see, though, that however slick and expensive telly gets, it can still go very wrong. Still, Brucie was having a whale of a time, and you’ve got to love a show where the presenter can read out the time next week’s show is on, and shout “Ooh, that’s a better time, isn’t it?”