Why Strictly spoilers are balloon-bursting miseries

That’s the only way I can describe the spoiler accounts on social media which like to reveal who has been eliminated from Strictly before the results show.

They justify their sad little accounts on the grounds that we live in a world of 24/7 news, so it’s daft that the BBC maintains the illusion Sunday’s show is live.

They can scramble for the moral high ground as much as they want – deep down, they’re killjoys with nothing better to do.

I’m a Strictly fan.

I’m #TeamCalman all the way too!

The 43 second clip of her closing the show with ’Bring Me Sunshine’ summed up her love of the show, and the genuine joy of Strictly, and tapped perfectly into that nostalgia for the days when Saturday night telly attracted audiences of circa 20 million.

Like everyone else over the age of six, I’m not really that surprised to discover Sunday’s result show is actually record on a Saturday.

And, like everyone else, I don’t actually care. Let’s call it the magic of telly!

We tune in and we get two hours plus of top-notch entertainment – a show with a warmth that is the very opposite of the cynicism of XFactor’s dark soul.

What we see on screen in most shows bears little relation to what actually happens in the studio.

Anyone who has ever sat in a studio audience will know how it works.

We had a reporter at The Voice final a few years back. The Script performed live, but they’d been and gone by the time the audience got in, and the clip, and the chat with the host, slotted into so seamlessly you couldn’t spot the joins.

The balloon-bursting miseries who go out of their way to post spoilers need a slap across the chops with one of the judges’ score paddles.

Attention seeking is never a great attribute even ammong toddlers. When it’s grown-ups involved, someone needs to point them in the direction of a more beneficial way of filling all that lonely time they must have on their hands.

You can plaster your account with ‘‘SPOILER ALERT’’ klaxons until everyone turns deaf – all it takes is for someone to retweet it and scunner fans who really don’t want to know.

And that, really, is why they do it. Because they can.

But, just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.

If spoiling the fun of others was an Olympic sport, we’d have some instant gold medal hopefuls in the Strictly ranks – and that isn’t a badge of honour.

I’d managed to avoid their ‘‘ooh, we know who has been knocked out’’ tweets until last Saturday when one landed like a wee grenade on my timeline. Cheers for that.

So, now they’re getting blocked. Life’s too short to indulge them. Better to mute and silence their whiny ‘‘me! me! me!’’ voices than let them spoil a night of entertainment.

And they could always try just simply enjoying the show!