I don’t watch Britain’s Got Talent—Simon Isn’t Interested—but I’m aware from the press coverage that it was won by Viggo Venn, who did a number of comedy routines involving high visibility jackets. I’m surprised that I’ve yet to see even a single think-piece drawing a comparison between the popularity of these comedy antics and the gilets jaunes_ protests.

This seems like fertile ground for an idioticly impassioned opinion piece from either end of the political spectrum. Yet—for reasons unknown—even the most disreputable columnists seem to have failed to scrape this nugget from the bottom of their commentary barrels.

People have said for years that Britain’s Got Talent is on the wane, while its viewing figures have certainly tumbled from the early days, I would have said that it remained part of the wider cultural conversation. It seemed much the same as This Morning: while competitor programmes attract much greater numbers of viewers, it retains a grip on the cultural consciousness.

But this year, I haven’t heard anyone talk about it, and wasn’t even really aware that it was happening—and now its open goal for tedious political commentary has been left untouched.

Perhaps it really is over.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.