So picture the scene.  I'm sitting (or Standing - let your imagination run wild, but try not to picture me in Lederhosen or jelly), reading the Radio Times.  I scan the listings, looking for something funny, or entertaining, or informative, but then my eye falls on the ITV listings.   And I see none of the above.

What has gone wrong?  Where are all the programs?  People obligingly sit through the adverts, making notes to buy Persil, or Kitty Cat, or become a teacher. So where does this money go?

My theory is that it all started to go downhill about 18 months to two years ago.  ITV purchased a really expensive telephone switchboard.  It was fantastic.  It did voicemail. It had lots of lights on it.  You could do that thing where you forward a call to someone else in the building and the number of the person who was originally calling appears on a little screen on the telephone of the person you are now forwarding the call to and  you talk to them in private before putting the incoming call through to tell them that you are putting an incoming call through to them.  Life was good.

But then the problems started.  We theorise that the repayments on the new switchboard were higher than ITV bosses thought.  They forgot to calcualte how much interest they would be paying, after all Jim Davison comes across as so sincere in that advert where the fake money is raining down on him in that studio made to look a bit like a car showroom that the essence of truth just seems to flow out of him; like some kind of green gooey stuff.

This left the ITV bosses with a dilema.  They had no budget left to make programs.  All they had was a really expensive telephone switchboard.  They also had Carol Vorderman who had been living in the car park since being fired from BBC1, and Steve Penk who had been passing through in his quest to find some kind of personality that would distinguish him from a table-lamp or a sideboard (a bit like the Tinman in The Wizard of Ozz, except for a personality instead of a heart, and less tin).  So the heads of ITV issued the following directives to all their program makers:

1. All progams must contain a telephone phone-in or voting element until a) We have paid for the new telephone system and b) We have worked out what all the buttons do.

2. All programs must also have the option for 'Texting' in votes, as soon as Terry has worked out how to set this up on the 'Uber-Telephonex 6000 XS system'.

3. All programs must be made up from the following formula.  Simply select one item from each of the columns in the table below:

When	Chefs	From Hell	Go Wrong	Presented by Steve Penk
If	Home Improvers	In Ibiza	Go Bad	Presented by Carol Vorderman
Tonight with	Mortgage Advisers	Undercover	Uncovered	With Trevor McDonald
So you think	Posh People	Are Ugly	Revealed
	Houses		Improved
	Gardens		Bloopers