Gareth Roberts

‘The UK’s first ever gay dating show is louder, prouder, and more irresistible than ever,' says the BBC about I Kissed A Boy. But things on the BBC Three reality dating show aren't what they seem. Amongst the gaggle of young gay men this time around is Lars: a 23-year-old hotel receptionist from Wolverhampton, who is, in fact, a woman. Yes, what was basically Love Island without women in its first series is now, in series two, like Love Island. Can't the gays just be left alone to have a dating show of their own? 'I‘ve been through 16 years of my life as a girl. It's aged me, but in a good way,' says Lars, who says they/them 'felt like a gay guy trapped in a woman's body.' What on earth that means, and how she could possibly know, is anybody’s guess.

Ian Hislop has found someone to blame for Have I Got News For You's failure to tackle the Supreme Court's gender ruling: the programme's editors. After the BBC show ignored the big story of the month on its Easter edition, Hislop launched into a rant on the latest episode – insisting that he had spoken about the subject: ‘A lot of people said Have I Got News For You was pathetic, because last week nobody answered this question (on the gender ruling). It was asked, actually. And I answered it at some length. I gave my views about John Stuart Mill’s clash of different rights and competitive demands on a legal system. And I talked for some time about what I thought was a very rational solution of the two parliamentary acts which the Supreme Court had been asked, and they cut it out.

Like most people, I haven’t tuned in to Have I Got News For You for years. But when I heard of a staggering omission in last Friday night’s edition, I just had to see it – or, rather, not see it – with my own eyes. The biggest news story of the week – the momentous ruling by the Supreme Court on the meaning of sex in the Equality Act 2010 – was not covered at all, even obliquely. You’d think that the absurdity of the highest court in the land being called to adjudicate on one of the most basic facts of observable reality – that there are two sexes, and that the words man and woman mean, er, man and woman – would be a rich source of mirth, the kind of glorious nonsense that’s a satirist’s meat and drink. But no. Not a word. Zilch.

The slow death of ITV makes for painful viewing. In its glory days of the 1980s and 1990s, the channel had a salty naughtiness, a thrilling random quality. Its kids’ shows were raucous or even scary, its crime dramas were raunchy, its quizzes and games were sparkly and crass and its highbrow offerings were spicy. The channel had an edge to it; watching ITV was aspirational and fun. It was cool. ITV has swapped any distinctive offering for constant retreads of the same generic thrillers But ITV has swapped any distinctive offering for constant retreads of the same kind of generic gloomy thriller; at the moment it’s tempting us with Red Eye, Protection and Grace.

Has the very online left, the bane of our times, been usurped by the very online right? It’s a poetically appealing idea, for sure – an amusing conceit. But I really don’t think so. Purity spirals and internecine denunciations have been a feature of the last decade or so in the era of woke. This seems to have been mainly fostered by women, for which Louise Perry persuasively makes the case here. Perry argues, convincingly, that a lot of the progressive censoriousness was female-led – or at least female-coded – and introduced using passive-aggressive HR ‘guidelines’, office politics, etc.

In bleak times, Brits could rely on light entertainment to get them through. George Formby and Vera Lynn made the Blitz bearable. Slade and T Rex got people through the three-day week and power cuts of the 1970s. In the good times of the money-in-your-pocket 1990s, we had equally cheery, cheeky media like The Fast Show, The Full Monty, boy bands and Britpop. But nowadays, when the headline news is depressing, low culture has deserted us. Light entertainment takes itself so seriously that it no longer provides any form of escape. The tediously partisan agit-prop that is today's The Last Leg offers no such sanctuary The high-end TV hits that fill our screens are all grim and self-important.

Pity poor James O’Brien. The long-suffering remainer has always had a raw, fiery quality unusual in the British phone-in host. Where most of his male colleagues tend to be pear shaped more than bear shaped – and where female radio presenters often resemble head girls sitting bolt upright in the front row of the class with their hands up – O’Brien has always been an outlier. Even if O'Brien sounds the part as a radio host, he has never quite looked it. In LBC promo photographs of the smiley, ‘say cheese’ variety, he looks uncomfortable. O'Brien resembles a bouncer in the background in a wedding album. He has hosted a weekday morning phone-in discussion for LBC for over two decades, but I still can't help think he is in the wrong job.

When will the BBC get a grip? The corporation which, remember, is funded by licence payers, appears to be strangely overgenerous to its ‘marginalised’ executives with saintly protected characteristics. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT), ethnic minority, disabled and female BBC bosses typically earn more money than their colleagues, statistics buried in the corporation’s annual report have revealed. Senior managers who are LGBT earn salaries 15.6 per cent larger than those who are not, the Daily Telegraph reported – while top bosses from ethnic minority backgrounds earn around 12 per cent more than those who are white. This questionable generosity with licence fee cash comes after a slew of other recent BBC shockers.