Poll: Why Saturday night TV is Strictly no contest

Once upon a time it was the battle of the prime-time heavyweights.

It was the glitzy hot-hoofing spectacular against the talent extravaganza that got the whole nation talking.

But when Strictly Come Dancing returns to our TV screens tomorrow night, it can do so with the cocky swagger of a muscular prizefighter stepping into the ring and finding that his latest opponent is a seven-stone weakling.

Because the annual fight for viewers between Strictly and its ITV rival, The X Factor, just isn't a fight any more. It's BBC1 dressed in sequins and gold lamé, whirling and pirouetting dizzyingly around ITV until the latter one falls over. It is, as they say in football, men against boys.

To continue the football analogy, all rivalries swing one way and then the other, and at the moment, Strictly is West Brom and The X Factor is Wolves. But, with no televisual Fosun International to step in and redress the imbalance, this feels less like a rivalry and more like a grotesque mismatch. This has got 'X Factor 1 Strictly 5' written all over it.

Lord knows The X Factor has tried yet again to boost its flagging fortunes, bringing back the 'classic' front four of Cowell, Walsh, Osbourne and Scherzinger to act as judges, and inexplicably ditching the studio audience in the early skirmishes. The end result has been little short of catastrophic, with the series' opening show registering the second-worst viewing figures of its entire lifespan, and only missing out on the all-time wooden spoon by one per cent.

Their opening mark of 6.8 million viewers was down 800,000 on last year when, lest we forget, Nick Grimshaw and Rita Ora were two of the judges. That's rather like losing a popularity contest to Katie Hopkins.

So why are they dying so hard, and likely to very publicly continue doing so even more once Strictly strikes up the band?

Could this even make the X an ex Factor?

It's a classic case of familiarity versus contempt. Strictly has scarcely tinkered with its basic formula in 13 series, its judging panel remaining more or less reassuringly concrete. If a judge has left the show, it has been to pursue other challenges, rather than being dumped on the whims of the capricious Cowell. Celebrities turn up, they dance, they dance off, and then ultimately there is a winner. If it ain't broke, the producers clearly think, then why fix it?

There have been a couple of minor 'scandals', but apart from that, in the choppy waters of Saturday night prime-time, it has been smooth sailing all the way. The extra-curricular activities, which always involve dance partners becoming real-life couples, seem somehow quaintly appropriate.

If Strictly proves one thing, it's the beneficial effects of giving your audience exactly what they want.

X Factor, on the other hand, treats its audience with the contempt that was once only reserved for its more appalling auditionees, coupled with a bull-in-a-china-shop approach to reformatting, chopping and changing. I look at The X Factor and see a show that really doesn't care about its audience at all, which is why, this year, for example, we've already had one contestant who was in last year's series, and one, Ryan Lawrie, who had even already managed a record deal for a Glaswegian label and released a single in 2013 that reached 39 in the iTunes charts.

Such incidents are not without precedent, but they fundamentally violate what is surely the whole point of X Factor – that it could unearth a megastar of the future from out of nowhere. It's about an unassuming youngster, or indeed not-so-youngster, shuffling uncertainly out on stage and stunning us with a beautiful performance a la Michelle McManus in Pop Idol. It shouldn't be about some failed popstrel using the show as a vehicle for a second crack at the big time.

All of those hundreds upon hundreds of hopefuls who queue for hours for the show's initial regional auditions should be under no delusions – they are there to make up numbers, so that the show presenters can rave about the massive turn-out as the camera swoops high over crowd scenes and pans along a line snaking around the block. In the Saturday night ratings war, they are the cannon fodder.

One thing's for sure, no matter how many thousands turn up for these auditions, the show's massed producers, talent spotters and whoever happens to be judging that year, are not finding diamonds in the rough amongst them.

The show's 2015 winner, Louisa Johnson, has released one single to date. Forever Young, timed to hit the Christmas Number One spot, reached number nine.

The year before, Ben Haenow, did hit the top spot with Something I Need. Follow-up single Second Hand Heart made number 21, and his debut album reached number 10. This is in an era when a performing seal could release an album full of flipper-clapping and expect at least top 5. This year, he 'left' Cowell's Syco Records.

This year, the show has vowed to win back viewers with more novelty acts, but really, what's the point, beyond the audition stage? We've already seen the appalling mockery of a rapper, Honey G, who has no real chance of winning AT ALL, progress past the judges. Fun to laugh at once, but honestly, don't give a deluded woman the belief she can get a record deal only to dash her against the rocks.

Meanwhile, on Strictly, they've rustled up another genius line-up – who doesn't want to see what rangy Olympic long jumper Greg Rutherford can do on the dancefloor? Or stern TV judge Robert Rinder? Or, best of all, former Labour Cabinet member Ed Balls?

If I'm right, and X Factor has a bizarre contempt for its audience whereas Strictly loves theirs, then this weekend will prove one indisputable fact: Love will always prevail.

By Pete Cashmore