AMANDA PLATELL: Family TV shows have lost the X factor

A few nights ago I had a dream — no, a nightmare — after falling asleep while watching I’m A Celebrity.

I was trapped in an endless loop of ITV’s flagship show, being forced to watch people I’d never heard of talking about things I didn’t care about and doing weird things with cockroaches and marsupials’ testicles.

The news soon after that the show had lost 5 million viewers, down from 11 million, when the new series launched just a few weeks ago hardly came as a surprise. And we can’t blame it all on the return of the detestable co-host Ant McPartlin.

Something is happening — and it’s not just to I’m A Celebrity. 

For years The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent have been mainstays of Saturday nights — between them they produced Susan Boyle, Ashleigh and her dancing dog Pudsey, toothy Paul Potts, Alexandra Burke, Leona Lewis, One Direction and Little Mix.

Yet this week it emerged that the long-term future of both shows is in the balance after fraught negotiations between Simon Cowell’s production company and ITV.

One insider said: ‘The days of the four-month X Factor Saturday night domination are well and truly over.’

The show will be back next year despite falling ratings and BGT seems to have struck a new deal.

But perhaps we have fallen out of love with the programmes because the presenters have become more famous than the performers.

More attention is now given to Cowell’s scowl, Amanda Holden’s nipples and Alesha Dixon’s barely clad thighs than to the real stars — the ordinary folk following their dreams.

In the case of I’m A Celebrity, we feel there’s more to entertainment than eating animal gizzards in a jungle setting and buckets of insects.

What’s so sad is that these shows — particularly X Factor and BGT — were firmly in the vein of traditional Saturday-night family entertainment, a tradition that goes back to vaudeville and takes in Opportunity Knocks and New Faces.

Today, the hottest reality TV show is Love Island. Instead of honest amateur entertainment, we’ve got a nasty narcissistic show that plays on the heartstrings of single and lonely people searching for love.

With its tiny thong bikinis and sculpted pecs, Love Island digs deep into young people’s fears of rejection, into their insecurities — and preys on their conviction that the more perfect you look, the happier you will be.

Which is why, for all the ghastliness of X Factor, BGT and I’m A Celebrity, I will regret their passing.

There is one consolation, though. Strictly is still there for us. It cha-cha-cha’d its way into our hearts 15 years ago. And we’re still embracing it closer than a hot-to-trot tango partner.

It’s another double ‘oh’ for Mr Bond

I was not stirred but shaking with laughter over sneak previews of the new politically correct 007 movie featuring three gorgeous Bond girls.

Whoops, we can’t call his semi-clad pouting adornments that any more! They are all serious characters in their own right.

So why does the mystery beauty and exotically named Paloma, played by Ana de Armas, appear with a cleavage slashed to her navel revealing her preposterously perfect breasts?

Trump’s nemesis is unmoved 

Distinguished scribes wrote that one of Washington’s most powerful politicians, Nancy Pelosi, made a passionate and indignant speech as she began the impeachment process against President Trump. 

We’ll have to take their word for it. Because I swear the face of the 79-year-old Speaker of the House of Representatives — mocked by Republicans as Botox Nancy — did not move a millimetre during her entire tirade.

The jury is still out in the court of public opinion as to who to believe in the Prince Andrew versus Virginia Roberts case after her tearful Panorama claims that she was forced to bed the sweaty Duke.

All those of us who love the Queen know is that her shamed second son has brought unimaginable disgrace and pain to the Royal Family.

Insiders say that despite requests for him to stay away, Andrew is insisting on appearing at church on Christmas Day.

My advice, Andy, would be to desist and disappear. Haven’t you hurt your elderly mother and father enough already?  

A joyful Kate and William seem to be popping up every day, smiling, and doing what the royals do best — supporting good causes, brimming over with Christmas cheer, neither complaining nor explaining, showing that the future of the monarchy is safe in their hands.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan said it was right for the city’s fire chief Dany Cotton, in charge during the Grenfell Tower disaster, to step down early. 

Faced with a blaze unprecedented in London this century, she had issued a textbook ‘stay-put’ order for residents as the blaze spread, and was criticised for insensitivity later when she said she ‘would not have done anything differently’. 

Yet under her orders, firefighters heroically rushed into the building risking their lives to save others. 

It’s not Cotton who Khan should be gunning for, but those who placed the deadly cladding on the tower in the first place. 

Topping up her tan in Miami, a beatific Kate Moss takes to the sun lounger wearing a black ruched swimsuit. 

Even for supermodels, there comes that moment when the string bikinis are flung in the bin and, as a mum in your mid-40s, you embrace the joys and comfort of a flattering tummy-sucky-in one-piece with enthusiasm. 

In her latest rant supporting the Extinction Rebellion cause, Emma Thompson says that when the crops fail, we will have to eat our pets to survive. Sorry Em, but when the apocalypse comes, you’ll have to casserole me before you get my cat Ted. 

Election round-up

• Washed-up windbag John Major, whose sheer incompetence gifted Labour 13 years in power, calls on Conservatives not to vote Tory. That should add another one or two per cent to Boris’s poll lead.
• In the Jewish Labour Movement’s damning dossier into endemic anti-Semitism under Corbyn, the most horrifying racism was against women MPs. Ruth Smeeth was called a ‘yid c***”, Margaret Hodge told her ‘smear campaign would make Goebbels proud’ and Luciana Berger that Labour would ‘rid the Jews, who are a cancer on all of us’. Let’s hope come Thursday we will have seen the end of the malignant, misogynist, Jew-hating takeover of a once noble party.
• Meanwhile, Corbyn reveals he’s ‘not very good at housework’ (for which read: doesn’t do any) yet at home is ‘head manager of all composting’. What a perfect metaphor for the decaying old Marxist.

Jack’s legacy is this vital lesson

After Jack Merritt was stabbed to death by Usman Khan, John Crilly protected others at London Bridge by attacking the killer with a fire extinguisher.

Jack Merritt knew both Khan and Crilly. Each of them had been released early from ‘life’ sentences and he was their mentor in an offenders’ rehabilitation programme.

Khan was a convicted Islamic terrorist, Crilly a career criminal complicit in the manslaughter of a pensioner during a robbery. 

Jack’s mission in his short life was to save them. With Khan he failed, with Crilly he succeeded.

Perhaps Jack’s legacy will be to teach us that when it comes to redemption, there is a huge difference between terrorists driven by ideology and criminal offenders. 

That the former will always harbour hatred in their hearts while opportunist criminals like Crilly can turn their lives around.

And that men like Khan should be locked away truly for life — for the sake of everyone else’s life.

After escorting Melania Trump around a Salvation Army present-wrapping session in East London, schoolgirl Isabelle Bates, ten, was surprised to learn that the First Lady had never eaten a mince pie.

Oh, the innocence of youth! To maintain a perfect size zero figure like Melania’s, a woman isn’t even allowed to know how to spell mince pie.