Just how good is Britain's Got Talent?
What an unexpectedly glorious festival of television it has turned out to be.
I'm a complete convert, after having confidently predicted to myself that this sort of terribly old-fashioned programme would leave me cold - so much so that I'll be here Sunday night to live blog the show, if you care to join me.
But I have no shame in standing up before you all and saying I have been completely entranced in by its palace of varieties - rapping grannies, the Michael Jackson singing monkey, the Klever Kanine line dancing dogs - and let's not even mention that man who did Kylie dancing to I Can't Get You Out of My Head.
Britain's Got Talent has got Britain talking - precisely because so much of what we have seen has had real power.
Sad-faced Paul, the Carphone Warehouse salesman who stopped the entire theatre in its tracks with his opera singing.
And six year old Connie, with her two front teeth missing and a microphone nearly half her size.
Perfect television, and perfect for the internet as well. Clips of the acts are storming up the Viral Video Chart and Connie's rendition of Over the Rainbow has been viewed more than 1m times on YouTube in three days.
The real long-term significance of Britain's Got Talent is that it is a wake-up call to the television industry.
It shows us how very simple pleasures in life - someone making a complete tit of themselves (or, indeed the opposite) - can often be the best.
Stripped of celebrity and pretension, the acts bravely fronting up to the judging trio of Simon Cowell, Piers Morgan and Amanda Holden have reconnected us with a very old-fashioned form of simple and honest entertainment that TV had eschewed long ago for empty pleasures of celebrity and reality.
No doubt the programme will attract criticism for being overly smaltzy and mawkishly appealing to the emotions. I know that critics usually recoil from making such statements, but perhaps we all need a bit more sentiment in our lives.
Beyond its hosts, judges and even its acts, the programme also connects us with ourselves through the amazed and very genuine reactions that we see on the faces of the men and women in the audience - a tribute to the great British telly watching public.
Piers Morgan encapsulated the heart of the programme during last night's live semi-final:
"When I signed up to do this show I remember talking to Simon and we both shared this vision of finding someone doing an ordinary job, very unassuming, who quietly had an amazing talent and we could provide them with a platform to just show the world what they could do."
Kind of leaves Big Brother's racist bullying for dead, doesn't it?
