The year 2004 can feel very recent and yet entirely another age. Call on Me by Eric Prydz and Cha Cha Slide were two of the biggest-selling singles in the UK charts; less than half of British homes had broadband internet; a plucky young Harvard student named Mark Zuckerberg launched a social network called "The Facebook".
It was also the big year for reality TV. Rebecca Loos, once the supposed paramour of David Beckham, manually collected the semen from a boar in The Farm and Big Brother producers had to bring in security and cut the live broadcast because "Slick" Vic and Emma started physically fighting. Peter Andre and the glamour model formerly known as Jordan met on I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! while Natasha Kaplinsky was the inaugural winner of Strictly Come Dancing.
Despite every other reality show comi ng and going, as well as all the profound changes to how we watch TV (and much else besides – we have had seven Prime Ministers since 2004) Strictly and I'm a Celebrity remain the workhorses the BBC and ITV, respectively, depend upon to get eyeballs on their channels.
There have been 442 episodes of I'm a Celebrity before its 24th series begins next Sunday; this week's Strictly will be the competition's 498th outing. Both have spawned spin-off programmes so that viewers can watch people talk about the thing they have already watched.
While live viewing figures for both I'm a Celebrity and Strictly have fallen in recent years from a peak of 10+ million each, that can be explained by changing wa tching habits (the growth of streaming on BBC iPlayer and ITVX) as well as audience interest waning. Both, even Strictly after its annus horribilis, still get in excess of 7 million people watching live, which is huge given the plethora of options competing for viewers' attention.
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