It says something about the year the BBC has had that even its ballroom dancing competition has been mired in controversy.

As the final of Strictly Come Dancing is broadcast live tonight, Ofcom will still be examining the 1,800 complaints received about last week's show, where an unforeseen anomaly in the rules meant that no winner could be announced - leaving three celebrities to scrap it out for the title. Three! When there should have been only two - imagine!

This event led to a tabloid meltdown of such magnitude that when George Bush had shoes thrown at him in Iraq, it was relegated to a small box on page 9.

Of course, for anyone remotely calm or sane, a mistake where the worst thing that happens is that some bloke from Holby City dances an extra mambo is neither here nor there. But then, this has not been a calm or sane year for television

- and particularly Strictly Come Dancing. After all, this was the year where John Sergeant's resignation from the show made the News at Six. The week before, when the “dance-off” was between the two black contestants - the M People singer Heather Small and the Rising Damp actor Don Warrington - it prompted a broadsheet debate on whether both the BBC, and the voting public, were institutionally racist. That the BBC and the public were institutionally forgiving of M People's honking Search for the Hero single, instead, never seemed to be considered.

But then, mass entertainment shows such as Strictly Come Dancing stand at the nexus of a shifting, mutating 21st-century media. I know! You would never have put money on it. Tonight's finalists - the DJ Lisa Snowdon, the Holby City star Tom Chambers and the former S Club 7 member Rachel Stevens - are in their dressing rooms at BBC TV Centre, applying three inches of fake tan and a kilo of sequins, in the belief that tonight's show is about little more than nailing their posture on the Viennese waltz. They're wrong, of course.

Along with similar phone-voting shows such as The X Factor, and I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here!, Strictly and its attendant tabloid controversies point up a change in the relationship between broadcaster and viewers.

Previously, broadcasters made programmes, viewers watched the programmes, and that was pretty much it. Now, however, in the world of “Internet 2.0” - YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook - where content is created by the public rather than a formal “provider”, viewers have a different relationship with programmes.

Along with the rise of phone-vote shows, it has led to a climate where viewers effectively control the “plot” of programmes, evicting the unpopular, “saving” their favourites and blurring the divide between viewers and programme-makers.

Given this temperature increase in what used to be simply sitting on the sofa, watching some telly, it's little wonder that tonight's Strictly Come Dancing will, almost inevitably, be tomorrow's headlines and controversy. Personally, all I can conclude is: Down with Rachel! Lisa to win!!!!!

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