THEY’RE booting 81-year-old Bruce Forsyth and 65-year-old Len Goodman off Strictly Come Dancing because they’re just too wrinkly for the job and replacing them with much better-looking guys half their age.

Don’t worry, I’m only joking, of course Brucie and Len will be back as usual for the new series in the autumn because they are men and therefore still permitted to have major roles on the show even though they’re prehistoric by telly standards.

The same, however, doesn’t appear to apply to women as Strictly announced that, first, Arlene Phillips (66) and now Karen Hardy (39) are to be replaced in the next series by newer, younger models.

Enter stage left former winner and pop star Alesha Dickson, 30, hired to replace Phillips on the judging panel, and Lithuanian Katya Virshilas, 25, and Australian Natalie Lowe, 28, a duo of youthful fluffiness who will be stepping into Hardy’s sparkly sling-backs to act as dancing partners to the next lot of cha-cha-ing celebs.

Despite well-placed quotes that Hardy, who was born in Weymouth and started dancing in Bournemouth at the age of five, has “a variety of other exciting projects” up her sequinned sleeve and is by all accounts deliriously happy to be relinquishing her role, cynics are not convinced and the decisions have brought about a flurry of accusations of ageism yet again at the Beeb.

To be fair, it does increasingly seem that to succeed in the ferocious business they call show these days you need to have the hide of an elephant but certainly not the wrinkles, and most channels have been involved in their share of televisual euthanasia.

Take Fern Briton, bastion of British daytime telly in ITV, and for the past 10 years, a kindly big sister/aunt/mum (delete as appropriate) to millions of ordinary viewers.

When she finally hung up her clipboard and comedy-incontinence gadget the other week, was her replacement a bubbly doppelganger, a sort of “everywoman” with similar likes and dislikes, problems and life experiences to her This Morning audience? Was she heck.

It’s Holly Willoughby. Holly is the new Fern, so to speak, and she is an ultra-glamorous, 28-year-old model-cum-presenter, best mate of trendy Radio 1 DJ Fearn Cotton and who just happens to have been the co-presenter of Dancing on Ice alongside – wait for it – Fern’s This Morning co-host Phillip Schofield (age 47, so plenty of years left on his clock).

But Hardy is only 39 for goodness sake, hardly what you’d call past it.

Plus, she’s a born trouper, with loads of energy who has won countless national and international dance competitions, has her own teaching studio and is a highly-respected dance judge.

Naturally she is a great hoofer, oh, and she just happened to win the 2006 series of Strictly Come Dancing, so even if no longer tripping the light fantastic, surely she was the ideal replacement for Phillips on the panel of pettiness?

Which leaves everyone wondering why someone who seems prefect for the part is suddenly old news?

And speaking of which, even stalwarts such as Kate Adie and Moira Stewart were suddenly deigned too lined to talk about front-lines on the news and so a proliferation of newer, slicker models, expert in a little light auto-cueing, now rule our newsdesks.

Whatever next?

Rumours that Barbara Windsor AKA Peggy “gerrourramoipub!” Mitchell could soon be replaced in EastEnders by one of Terrence the terrier’s puppies is just nonsense... or is it?