Sing It Back : Lyric Champion 2007 = Everything that is wrong with ITV

Last week when visiting my wife in hospital, I found myself watching her TV in her room and was confronted by what must go down as the worst TV programme on any of the mainstream TV stations at the moment.

Sing It Back : Lyric Champion 2007 is a simple concept. They play you a line from a song, you have to attempt to sing the next line. And it is this principle that is maintained throughout the whole show. Somehow there is something strangely compelling about the programme, but only in the same way as when you are in a pub and someone awful is singing on a karaoke machine. You knows its bad, you know that you ought to leave, but you hang on anyway.

The show is made even worse, at least for me, but having to of the most wooden TV presenters ever, in "JK and Joel", and pairing of Radio One DJ's that ITV presumably thought were going to be the next Ant and Dec. Unfortunately they read their autocue with a look of startled insincerity on their faces, one of them (I don't know which is which) flails his arms around uncontrollable trying to add emphasis to the wrong words, and to be honest, they look like they have been dressed by some one's mum.

Everything that is wrong with ITV is in this one programme. A cheap pub quiz concept, a set that looks like it has been loaned to them by The X Factor (oh how ITV must be counting down the weeks until that show is back), presenters who make you squirm (and I hadn't even mentioned Paul Gambacini stuck in to some sort of raised pod like a judge at the front of the set), and a real lack of any real entertainment.

The title "Sing it Back : Lyric Champion 2007" makes you fear that this could become an annual event. Please, please don't let there be a 2008 !