tenthofjune

I really detest the telephone voting shows that currently pass as Saturday night ‘entertainment’, but my wife watches Strictly Come Dancing. What I do find funny, is the continued survival of John Sergeant (often misspelt ‘Sargent’) and how it’s really starting to annoy the judges.

However, it got me wondering – what if you wanted to intentionally sabotage one of these programmes? What better way to do it than to use their over-reliance on telephone voting against them.

Remember Eurovision 2006 in Athens, when Finland group ‘Lordi’ famously won with a heavy metal rock track? Thousands of viewers across Europe saw the chance to tip the result in favour of the outsider. Whether this was the otherwise silent number of hard rocks fans or Eurovision-skeptics looking to make a fool of the competition, it is not known, but the result was a resounding win for outsider Finland.

What if John Sergeant’s survival is not entirely down to his fan-base, but is in fact due to a long awaited backlash against this kind of show? What better way to discredit Saturday night pseudo-talent-judge-vote shows than to make a complete farce of the selection process by making the judging of any actual skill irrelevant. John Sergeant even alluded to this last night, when he pointed out that they were only playing by the rules – the judges only account for 50% of the vote.

Whether John’s votes come from a disparate number of ‘mischievous viewers’, simply trying to throw a spanner in the works, or an organised number of people intentionally trying to tilt the vote (Top Gear maybe), Len Goodman’s comments last night about people voting for John making a nonsense of the show, have only served to help John’s cause by keeping him out of the bottom two for yet another week.