In 1984, Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean won an Olympic gold medal for ice dancing. ITV are now carefully reminding us that they haven’t gone away you know because we now have Dancing on Ice.

Dancing on Ice is like Strictly Come Dancing (On Ice) except there’s the added bonus of participants all of whom are so famous you’ll have heard of 1 of them (in my case, this year, that’s Mikey Graham from Boyzone) perhaps managing to hurt themselves in some spectacular manner. Apparently all the girls are getting injured and on last night’s Friday special with two more famous people you can’t recognise (oh look. that’s Colleen Nolan, she used to be famous, wasn’t famous and is now famous again dammit) they had an argument over whether it was harder for the blokes or the girls.

Ultimately I don’t care. I can’t work out whether I want them to skate near perfectly or I want them to fall over. Which would be more entertaining? This year, they foisted Emma Bunton, formerly of the Spice Girls as a judge. I must go to Wikipedia and find out exactly how qualified she is to be judging ice-skating. The judge whom I had the most time for on the rerun of last Sunday’s program was Robin Cousins. He won Olympic gold in 1984 and works as a coach. He definitely knows his stuff alright.

It bugs me though. Eurosport are showing the European Figure Skating championships at the moment and last night it was the final of the ice dance…I caught two of the top three couples, the two who did best last night although they didn’t carry off gold as it happens. As was completely unsurprising, they were far more entertaining to watch than the wannabees on ITV earlier. To me, Dancing on Ice isn’t really reality television; it’s fantasy television.

It’s disappointing, however, that it gets more viewers than real proper ice dancing done by people who know what they are doing and are really at the top of their game. The Olympics are on this year after all.