BACK in the good old days, when England was still a great nation, we were all free to enjoy harmless spectacles. Bear-baiting or witch-ducking, for instance.

In those days of public hangings, villains paid the ultimate price for their crimes, and we all got to see justice done - with a cracking day out, watching those tumbrels roll.

If knitting under the gibbet wasn't your thing, then at the very least, you could look forward to chucking rotten eggs and fruit at those getting their richly-deserved comeuppance.

Prize-fighters would proudly take on all comers when the travelling fair came to town, and you were guaranteed a decent belly laugh by taking a tour around the local mad house.

All that, of course, was before the PC/human rights brigade moved in to spoil our fun.

The rack, the boot, the iron maiden - they're nothing more than museum pieces now.

Even the birch has been given the bum's rush.

That's why I say three cheers for Channel 4. At least there's somebody out there upholding our nation's proud tradition of picking wings off flies.

Jade and Shilpa are both grown women, after all.

It's surely a fair fight, and if some of the other women in the Big Brother house choose to take sides so they aren't torn to shreds in turn, well that's all part of the natural order of things. Survival of the fittest. Plus, there's nothing like a good catfight.

It was a bit of a surprise at first that Jade was the one who ended up walking the plank at the weekend.

She bucked the trend she was part of when she appeared on Big Brother first time around - that delight the voters seem to take in refusing to evict obnoxious contestants, leaving them to make freak shows of themselves and to make life hell for their housemates.

But I was forgetting. Now Jade's out of the house, it's really open season on her.

Live by the sword, die by the sword, that's what I reckon, and it's all good fun for the innocent bystanders.

All good things must come to an end, though, and it was a true master stroke on Channel 4's part to pull its new reality show, Shipwrecked, out of the bag this week.

It's almost as if they had planned it for the moment when we were growing weary of lobbing stones at Jade, and were looking around for fresh blood to entertain us.

So step forward Lucy Buchanan, the former York public schoolgirl eager to share the opinions that show what a fine specimen of British womanhood she is.

All the better for us to kick Jade out of the stocks, and stick Lucy there instead.

The only fly in the ointment is that Lucy will apparently change her opinions during the series, thanks to the arguments of others on the programme.

Has the woman no sense of duty? Doesn't she realise she's next month's bigot?

And what are the rest of the Shipwrecked crew playing at by demonstrating reasonable behaviour?

It's something for Channel 4 to worry about. Seriously. Ratings will surely plummet if we don't get the chance to feel morally superior to somebody from the comfort of our living rooms.

What would be far worse, however, is if the way people have been emerging from these shows started to put people off from applying to take part.

What on earth would we find to do for entertainment if the reality TV died a death? They'd have to bring back hanging, that's for sure.