Frosty reception: Jayne Torvill, Christopher Dean, Philip Schofield and Holly Willoughby, the presenters of Dancing on Ice. Photograph: Nicky Johnson/ITV
What will Saturday nights look like if we're no longer allowed to phone or text in our votes? Would there be much point to sitting through Dancing on Ice without getting a say in who gets to fall over next week? Would the the X Factor hold any appeal if you were denied the chance to pay to let Simon, Sharon or Louis know just how much you disagree with them? Will we all feel suddenly impotent without the ability to make a difference, to register our emotions - a disenfranchised TV nation? Will we ever be able to vote for our right to vote?
Maybe they'll carry on without the audience vote - install some kind of pop politburo that'll decide on your behalf who's going through. American Idol still seems to do pretty well here even though British audiences can't vote for any of them. Most of these Saturday night shows are really just versions of 1970s variety shows, revamped with audience participation technology to ramp up the profits - we didn't get to phone in on Opportunity Knocks.
Of course, the TV stations would hate to lose this bonus cash stream, but how crucial is the actual process of entering the TV polling station to audiences now we're used to it? If they installed some kind of digital clapometer would you care as much about the winners and losers? Does paying to vote give you some kind of vested interest in the outcome that would be lost if they had to scrap it all together?
Maybe this'll be the point that people realise that paying to register a vote isn't really audience participation, that this vague TV democracy has always been a rip-off in the more general sense of just not being very good value for money.
