Strictly Come Dancing: Social media 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 on the Sunday.

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.

Like every other fan over the age of six, I’m not really that surprised to discover Sunday’s result show is actually recorded on a Saturday.

And, much 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 that long corroded XFactor’s 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 Strictly spoilers know that and need a slap across the chops with one of the judges’ score paddles.

Attention seeking is never a great attribute even among 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 spoiler ranks – and that isn’t a badge of honour.

When a show comes along that is packed with entertainment - perfect Saturday night viewing - at these grim times, let us all enjoy the glitz and the spectacle of some astonishing dancers, and I say that as someone who will only ever stand half a chance of impressing the judges if Strictly asks me to do the Slosh,

So, as a new season beckons, the spoilers are being 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 braw telly.

And they could always try just simply enjoying the show!