Britain's not got talent. At least it hasn't if the TV show masquerading as a showcase of the nation's best talent is anything to go by.
You may have missed the programme. I wish I had, and I only saw it for ten minutes on Saturday night. Oh, and 20 seconds on Sunday.
It was ten minutes and 20 seconds of the most miserable, depressing TV I have seen in a long time.
The basic assumption of the show is that Britain is awash with stars; it's just that they haven't been discovered yet.
So anyone who can play Britney Spears hits on the spoons and a washboard, swallow hard boiled eggs or belch in time to Land of Hope and Glory is invited to perform in front of an "audience of millions".
On the judges' table alongside Simon Cowell, who's got talent because he's loaded, is former newspaper editor Piers Morgan, who may have had talent once but hasn't any more and would like a slice of it back (along with Cowell's millions) and actress Amanda Holden, who never really purported to have much talent but was once married to comedian Les Dennis, who is the sort of bloke who would have got on Britain's Got Talent 20 years ago, but would struggle today because there are now serious question marks over how much talent he had in the first place.
So that's the panel. What of the unsung stars? From what I briefly saw, there was a rap outfit, designed to appeal to the lower-middle class/working class viewer profile; there were two barmen from Manchester ("We're just two barmen from Manchester! We're being watched by 10 million people! Amazing!" they said without irony) whose party piece was to chuck bottles in the air, which is what they do on a good night out in Manchester; and a gap-toothed girl of six called Connie who sang like a gap-toothed girl of six and is being hailed as the next Charlotte Church, who was hailed as the next Bonnie Langford.
The winner of the show, mobile phone salesman Paul Potts, supposedly performs opera classic with a "Pavarotti-style," Pavarotti being the only opera singer – apart from the bloke on the Cornetto adverts – viewers of Britain's Got Talent have heard of. A huge career beckons, as it once did for other reality TV contest participants, like Darius.
Because Mr Potts is painfully shy, we are meant to empathise with him, shed tears at his triumph and ponder the question: how many other Paul Potts are out there, flogging the latest Nokias at Carphone Warehouse when they could be splitting eardrums at La Scala?
It has been suggested Britain's Got Talent represents the democratisation of television, giving the ordinary man, woman, child and non-medicated fantasist a crack at the big time. This is nonsense. The acts are more carefully selected than recruits for the security services. A few with skeletons in their closets are filtered through to help promote "TV scandal" headlines and boost viewing figures.
Make no bones about it, this TV show represents audience manipulation at its finest and most cynical, exploiting the basest emotional responses of pity, sentimentality, and, in the case of some of the acts, ridicule.
It has further been suggested Britain's Got Talent marks a joyous return to the era of music hall entertainment and variety shows. Doesn't anyone else remember how bad these TV shows were? Remember Seaside Special ("Live ... from Lowestoft") and The Good Old Days?
Unfortunately, a second series of Britain's Got Talent is a certainty. Brace yourself for farting parrots, toddlers dressed by as pearly kings and ventriloquist dwarfs saying: "Gottle of gear." It will all be in the worst possible taste.