One of ITV’s top-rating shows is I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. It features well-known people being put through a gruelling selection process and a winner is selected as the audience of millions votes off the less popular candidates. That is one way that ITV could conduct its hunt for a new chief executive.

In fact, things are shaping up rather more like the BBC’s The Weakest Link. There, the audience watches, as harsh questioning reduces a wide field to a handful and there’s an awful lot of tactical manoeuvring towards the end. Sometimes even the winner looks tarnished.