Last night we saw the two faces of ITV, and quite a strange Janus they would make: Stephen Fry and David Gest.
Fry's return to major ITV drama, Kingdom, was solid, warm and heartening, very much what you might call Old ITV.
Lucy Mangan describes it in today's Guardian as perfect Sunday-night viewing that "slips down as smoothly as a pint of Adnams". As a fan of the East Anglian ale myself, I can vouch for the aptness of the comparison.
It's good to see Fry, so magnificent as Jeeves in ITV's classic Wodehouse adaptation some 15 years ago, back to prominence in drama and not just wittering away amiably on QI.
It seems he is coming of age right now, cutting a very plausible figure as a mature and likeable lead actor, at home in the reassuring terrain of middle England that most Sunday night viewers enjoy.
And the ratings for Kingdom suggest ITV have a hit on their hands - 8.2 million tuned in between 9pm and 10pm, a very healthy 34% of the available audience.
So much for Old ITV. Now for New ITV, the cretinous cult that is desperate to embrace the Heat-reading demographic and has brought us the likes of Love Island and Wags' Boutique.
Now I really don't want to sound snobbish here: for instance, I think some of the Saturday night talent shows ITV does are terrific, old-fashioned entertainment reinvented with pizzazz and panache.
But TV, whatever "brow" it's pitched at, should be intelligently and honestly made, and on this score This Is David Gest was appalling.
It was just so bereft of entertainment value - we spent the first quarter of an hour watching the camera crew not being allowed in to film Gest's hotel suite and then watching him upbraid them for bringing in dirt when they did cross his hallowed portals.
Gest is far less amusing and appealing than ITV thinks he is, despite the tabloids' fixation with his eccentricities, and it's shocking that commissioners thought it was worth six instalments.
But worse than this, it was a highly cynical programme in my view. Not only was it shamelessly colluding with Gest's self-promotion (the autobiography, Simply the Gest, is out now, folks), it was effectively a tool for ITV to promote itself.
The programme follows Gest's attempts, after his successful appearance on I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! (need we mention, an ITV programme) to land himself a new career in Britain.
Of course, the result of his supposed quest is a foregone conclusion - he gets to be a judge on an ITV show, Grease is the Word, and meanwhile gets to star in this programme, his own "fly-on-the-wall" video diary.
In other words, this is a self-fulfilling cycle that ITV has created merely to fill up six slots of witless primetime viewing and to cross-promote its other shows.
The ratings show us that This Is David Gest was watched by 2.5 million, a 16% share, indicating it will prove rather less successful than Kingdom. Sometimes the overnights speak for themselves.
Presumably, some people, like me, watched both programmes. If so, they would have been left wondering if they were watching the same channel.
