After another hopeless amble around the dance floor on Strictly Come Dancing, John Sergeant, the 64-year-old political reporter, sidled over to the judges’ table for his weekly drubbing. With 10m viewers watching at home, Sergeant’s ego had not been this battered since Sir Bernard Ingham, the prime minister’s press secretary, famously heaved him out of a close-to-resignation Margaret Thatcher’s path live on the six o’clock news 18 years ago.

“Your dancing stinks,” cried Bruno Tonioli, one of the judges.

“More ha ha ha than cha-cha-cha,” chided Len Goodman, the head judge.

“You only gave John a one [point out of 10]?” protested Bruce Forsyth, who hosts the hit BBC1 show, to Craig Revel Horwood, another of the judging panel. “Does he not get any credit for entertainment?”

“Yes,” drawled Revel Horwood. “A one.”

Over on ITV, meanwhile, was a crooner who could understand Sergeant’s plight. Daniel Evans, a 38-year-old widower with an orange tan and scant vocal ability, had somehow bulldozed his way through heat after heat of the singing competition The X Factor, leaving the hopes of infinitely more talented contestants crushed — and the judges appalled.

After one especially poor turn a fortnight ago, winking and vamping to the Communards’ cover of Don’t Leave Me This Way (Evans’s songs tend to play on his wife’s recent death, even in “disco week”), Simon Cowell, the show’s creator and one of its judges, summed up the pool cleaner in inimitable style.

“One of the worst performances we’ve had on this show,” he sneered. “Ghastly. Absolutely hideous. This has got to stop.”

Unfortunately for Cowell, it did not. At least until last night, when Evans was finally ejected, with just six rivals remaining. It was nevertheless weeks after he had been expected to be voted off.

Strictly Come Dancing and The X Factor rely on the public’s input for their outcomes. On X Factor, the judges get to save one of two singers with the least number of telephone votes from the public. On Strictly, the score is half decided by the judges, half by the public. And the public has seemingly decided to misbehave.

Confronted with cheesy Evans’s “pub singing” and the portly Sergeant’s “disasters”, you might think a fair-minded nation would have shown them the door in the first week, wishing to save them further embarrassment. Instead, they rushed to the telephones on Saturday nights to cast tens of thousands of votes to ensure that the “lovable losers” stayed on the television screens. Talent be damned.

At first it was funny for all concerned. Evans, not unreasonably, was likened to Ricky Gervais by X Factor judge Louis Walsh, while Sergeant was told by Goodman that “this isn’t Help the Aged, you know”. But, as the live shows tipped the halfway point in their run, the joke — for the judges, at least — seemed to be wearing thinner than one of Sergeant’s silk shirts.

“John just can’t dance,” said a bemused Tonioli, taking a break from rehearsing the show last week. “It’s like seeing your grandad give a turn every Saturday night.”

Last night Walsh confidently predicted before Evans’s performance: “Daniel is booking himself a one-way ticket out of this competition.” He had been expressing similar sentiments for weeks. At last he got lucky.

Nevertheless, the survival of Evans at the expense of more accomplished performers was the talking point of this X Factor series. What’s going on? Why are the stories of these talent shows being dominated by men with no apparent ability?

WHEN Laura White, one of a remarkably talented group of young female singers on this year’s X Factor, was voted off last week, her fans cried fix. An internet campaign began alleging that the voting system was rigged. Andy Burnham, the culture secretary, even felt moved to voice support for his constituent in the Commons. He complained that “the wonderful and talented” White had been “very harshly” treated.

On Wednesday a petition was handed to Ofcom, the media industry regulator, with about 50,000 signatures on it, stating: “Many thousands of viewers are convinced that either their call [for White] was blocked or their vote misappropriated.”

The firm in charge of the voting is adamant that there is nothing fishy about the votes — and ITV would be foolhardy in the extreme to risk any further phone-voting scandals. “Our technology is 100% accurate, the system can take up to 200,000 calls a minute,” said Ed Boddington, chief executive of Harvest Media. “The fact is with these reality shows,” he added with a smile, “that the person who gets voted off is not always what people expect. Personal taste takes people by surprise.”

Our taste, it seems, is for underdogs. The surprise is that the less talented they are, the more we like them.

“Strictly’s ratings were down on last year,” said Boyd Hilton, television editor of Heat magazine, the reality TV show bible, “then suddenly last week it got a huge boost — and that’s down to the John Sergeant factor. How boring would these shows be if the good, talented dancers and singers just stayed in week after week?”

Esther Rantzen, in an article ungallantly headlined “Why all women love an ugly man”, opined that Sergeant made “male viewers of a certain age who, like him, are not as skinny as they once were, feel good about themselves”, and women “laugh and want to cuddle him”.

More likely, it is Sergeant’s twinkly-eyed subversiveness that appeals. Putting on a pair of velvet trousers to be judged by a histrionic quartet of ballroom aficionados can hardly have been a burning career ambition for the BBC’s former chief political correspondent. The faint smile tickling the corners of his mouth as he lumbers about after his dance partner Kristina Rihanoff, a pneumatic Siberian blonde, lets us know how ridiculous he finds the pantomime.

As do his hilarious self-mocking quips. Of his abysmal attempt at the tango, he said: “It has all the characteristics people associate with me — passion, rhythm and a raw sexuality.”

Compared with the fame-thirsty models and gimlet-eyed soap stars he is up against, Sergeant comes across as the public’s wry ambassador to the silly world of sparkles. We cheer and the judges wail.

Underdogs are suddenly everywhere. The sort of people who, when you endorse them, make you feel as if you are messing with the system. Barack Obama went out of his way to emphasise his “funny name” otherness in the US presidential election; Boris Johnson bumbled his way to the London mayoralty; and the once forgotten 1980s pop star Rick Astley was voted “best act ever” at the MTV awards this month based on one fluffy hit from 20 years ago and a humorous internet campaign.

Fans of Sergeant are even utilising the power of the internet as Obama did in his campaign. Facebook groups have sprung up called “John Sergeant to win” and “I love John Sergeant and want him to be my grandad”.

Peter Kellner, president of YouGov, the polling firm, believes our desire is to thwart authority — in the case of reality TV, to vote against the judges’ wishes — and that it is rooted deep in the British psyche. “The phenomenon goes back through history,” he said. “I suspect it’s to do with our geography, that we’re an island, surrounded by high seas and bad weather. We survive by pulling together, so it’s been a running theme that we override any sense of overbearing authority.”

There can be few so overbearing as Cowell, the pop impresario who has made a second career out of sharp put-downs for wannabe stars. However, when Evans auditioned for The X Factor, even Cowell was moved by his story.

In August last year, Evans and his wife Jackie had a baby daughter. Then, five days later, Jackie died from complications. Tragic Dan, as the tabloids soon named him, dedicated all his songs to his late wife and progressed through the competition. Before last night only once had he been in the bottom two in the public vote.

Would he have got so far if his personal narrative were not so sad? Probably not. “But sympathy can be a great motivator,” said Kellner. “Intellectually, we’re an empirical rather than a theoretical nation. We like what is fair.”

Hilton agreed. “The more the judges are horrible about an act the more the public will vote for them,” he said. ”

Sandra Wheatley, a psychologist, said. “It’s the ‘buggeration factor’ and it’s a part of the British psyche — that feeling of ‘I’ll show you’.”

She added that in Sergeant’s case there was also an element of some women recognising their menfolk in him. “As much as we would all like to wake up next to an Austin Healey [the former rugby star who is another contestant], the fact is we go to bed with a John Sergeant,” she said.

For Evans’s part, even a recent newspaper exposé about the fact that he had fathered two children with two mothers in the space of a few weeks as a younger man did not damage his saintly image. Cowell thought it was the votes of older women which had taken him as far as he went in the contest.

Watching the 2006 winner Leona Lewis, a genuine talent who has earned comparisons with Whitney Houston, perform in last night’s X Factor, Cowell must have wondered whether Evans’s run had made a mockery of his show. In judging Evans’s performance last night he admitted that it had perhaps happened already. “Whatever we say, the public are going to like you,” he said. “We have absolutely zero control over this show any more.”

ON the other side, even the usually even-tempered Goodman has taken to getting irate. “I like you,” he told Sergeant the other week, “but if somebody really deserving gets knocked out because [the voters] like you, it makes a nonsense of the show.”

Tonioli explained the judges’ annoyances: “As a human being, when you see someone in the bottom two who doesn’t deserve to be there, you get frustrated. But we love the viewers, honest. And I understand that being bad is very endearing. It’s part of the charm of the show. They can’t all be brilliant — but neither can we say he [Sergeant] is good when he’s not.”

Last night, however, the judges seemed to be acknowledging the public’s point of view, perhaps a touch cravenly. Faced with Sergeant’s passable American smooth, their marks for him rose to the giddy heights of seven out of 10.

They tempered their comments, too. “I finally get what other people see in you,” said Arlene Phillips. “It was quite endearing.”

Goodman added: “After seeing Terry Wogan doing the waltz [on Children in Need the night before] — you’re brilliant!” Now they understand.

A talent for insults

THE STRICTLY JUDGES ON JOHN SERGEANT

BRUNO TONIOLI
‘It looked like Dad’s Army does the Paso. You just looked very tired most of the time, you look like you need a siesta’

ARLENE PHILLIPS
‘This is supposed to be a party dance, I think you’ve seen more fun at a party conference. It was like a go-slow on the railways, it really was’

LEN GOODMAN
‘More ha-ha-ha than cha-cha-cha’

TONIOLI
‘It was like watching Winnie the Pooh and Tigger’

THE X FACTOR JUDGES ON DANIEL EVANS

LOUIS WALSH
‘The problem is you’re totally out of your comfort zone. Your in at the deep end, you’re a really nice guy but if I was going to call it after Michael Jackson I’d call it after Bad.’

SIMON COWELL
‘It was completely and utterly irrelevant because it was like somebody singing in a pub. I don’t think you would ever be a successful recording artist’

WALSH
‘You remind me of Ricky Gervais singing karaoke at a Christmas party. It didn’t work for me at all’

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