ACCORDING to a recent poll of Year 6 children at Talbot House School, their two favourite television shows are TV Burp (Saturdays ITV1 7.10pm) and Take Me Out (Saturdays ITV1 8.35pm).

The former left me thinking: “How cool and discerning are those guys?”, the latter stopped me dead in my tracks with my hand up in the air, yelling: “Miss, miss, you’ve made a mistake!”

Admittedly these shows do have a couple of things in common; one, they’re both hosted by two genuinely funny blokes, gargantuan-collared Harry Hill (Burp) and doorman dude, Paddy McGuinness (Out), plus they’re both on on Saturday night.

But otherwise, we’re talking chalk and cheese.

TV Burp is a joy, especially now Harry’s dropped the knitted toys and gone back to pure observation and an, albeit skewed, adoration of ordinary folks with televisual aspirations of the fame variety.

I have had perfectly sane readers refute this, calling him a fool, a flibertygibbet and even just a plain baldy git, but I stand by the Hillster as one of the few people on the box who can make you laugh out loud – and often unexpectedly.

But Take Me Out? Come on, the title is what exactly you’re brain is screaming while you’re watching it and perhaps that’s what it it’s all about.

Maybe it’s a public service broadcast aimed at lazy Saturday night sofa sacks in a bid to force them down the pub or the cinema.

For it is that bad.

Year 6 won’t remember Blind Date, but their parents will and this is its noughties re-incarnation, but now it’s drunk on cheap alco-pops and is wearing its pants on its head.

Instead of the astonishingly-uncharismatic Cilla Black’s immortal catchphrase “What’s yer name and where d’ya come from?” we now have Paddy yelling “No likey, no lighty,” at a bunch of ferociously made-up women, howling like cats during a full moon for a man to be shot down the ‘love lift’ and wiggle his sundries.

Mind you, the guys deserve everything they get, especially, I’m sad to say, Bournemouth’s offering, John, who made the unforgivable faux pas of wearing sunglasses indoors, a thing only the monumentally stupid or men having a mid-life crisIs ever do.

McGuinness saves the show – just – thanks to his daft sense of humour and, more crucial, sense of complete hands-up-it’s-not-my-fault attitude to the dross he knows he’s overseeing.

You know that he knows it’s not Phoenix Nights, but hey, it pays well and he’s got a supermodel missus to maintain.

And his “Let the whatever, see the whatever” quips just as the man is about to be spewed out of the elevator of elation are now almost legendary, no mean feat considering the rest of the show is instantly forgettable.

Among the many this week, we had “Let the Engelbert meet the Humperdink”, let the hokey see the cokey” and, my particular favourite, “Let the flip see the flop.”

He wanders around the stage, letting the contestants do the work.

When one woman clapped eyes on the boy-band-esque Dan from Warrington, she spelled out her appreciation: “He is H.O.T.T. hot!”

On how one of the previous weeks’ dates had gone, Paddy joked: Basically it was like Wayne Rooney’s ears – nothing between ‘em.”

So you see what we’re dealing with here.

It ended perfectly with a clip of yet another couple from the week before in which the woman cackled that she’d already had a hundred dates to which the guy looked dismayed, possibly because he was frantically trying to work out whether she was referring to the fruit or the human variety and whether that loud noise was emanating from his paramour or was merely another of Bournemouth John’s pit parps.