The Armchair's Web

The weekend TV war on both BBC1 and ITV is over for now, thank goodness. I was getting bored with the fact that both main channels had got into a heated spat over their Saturday scheduling clash.

ITV’s The X-Factor, which consistently beat its BBC rival Strictly Come Dancing throughout the season, ended with Joe McElderry winning the competition. Last night’s final ended the series with a staggering 19 million people tuning in, a figure unheard of for any show on TV these days, including the soap operas.

While so much attention was focused on Joe’s victory, a sportsman in the name of Ryan Giggs was the genuine worthy winner of the  BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year award.  At 36, Giggs is English football’s most decorative player, winning among many medals eleven top-flight titles with Manchester United, the club that he has been with since he was a boy. Perhaps probably the one regret is that being from Wales, he never got to play in any World Cup finals. The BBC show suffered under the X-Factor juggernaut when both were broadcast at the same time last night.

Even in this multi-channel, multi-platform universe, there are few TV shows which actually bring the whole family together to watch. One can hope that both BBC and ITV can come to an arrangement where viewers are able to watch both X-Factor and Strictly next year.