Turns out this happened last week too, so perhaps my theory is incorrect.

Orrrr, it was supposed to run on Tuesday and Wednesday, but Celebrity Traitors got in the way, and it has to run after the watershed.

Just checking, you were the useless young gossip columnist in question, right?

I'm sure the Forfeiture Committee will be taking a view in the near future.

Well, Farage has already called for that a few times for various things 🤷‍♂️

You don't understand the audience that Eurovision gets in the UK, do you. If the BBC withdrew then ITV would be in there like a shot and the Beeb would never get it back again. If there's one certainly then it's the UK participating.

This will likely be free online voting. The BBC isn't allowed to make a profit from this kind of thing which is why votes were only 12p per call before (which is still premium rate because it's in addition to your phone contract). Will be easier to monitor IP addresses so vote farms can be excluded.

@escgabe.com @wiwibloggs.bsky.social et al

If it was the case that the public understood how stamp duty works, and are all happy to pay it when they buy a property then I'd agree ... but they don't. If one person brings it up on the doorstep then I'd be surprised.

It falls on a Thursday this year btw.

... and as if to prove my point, right on cue. YouTube is full of excellent content creators, but you only hear of the bad ones for some reason.
www.bbc.com/news/article...

Of course there is. As you rightly say, this is not new or limited to social media. It's also a tiny proportion of the content. The way to combat that is supporting creators who produce well researched and high quality content - including those doing short form - not put everyone in the same basket.

My audience is in the hundreds, not thousands, so I doubt I was even considered for an invite.

The problem is your reference is not current. It's how social media was a decade ago. The creators that now produce very insightful long form content - the ones that actually have a large audience - will be the ones that No 10 has invited. Science, city planning, education, transport creators, etc.

Vine was a platform from 2012 to 2016 where people created 7 second video clips. Social media moved on from that a long time ago.