KEITH NEWBERY Talent is a no show when Widdy and Wagner perform

“Unfortunately,” said the great man, “Stradivarius couldn’t paint and Rembrandt made awful violins.”

I think of this every Saturday evening when I watch Ann Widdicombe (who can’t dance) lumbering around to great acclaim on Strictly Come Dancing, and Wagner (who can’t sing) wailing his way to unlikely success on The X Factor.

Then the obvious occurred to me. Why don’t they swap shows?

Ms Widdicombe looks the type who could warble an acceptable contralto, and Wagner is entirely capable of hoofing his way around a dance floor with an excess of style disguising an absence of substance.

This could be the compromise everyone is looking for, because both have reached that stage in their respective shows where their presence has become a little tiresome.

After all, there are only so many times you can laugh at the same joke.

Ms Widdicombe has trundled down an elegant stairway like a broken dump-truck, been lowered into the arena with a block and tackle, and been dragged around the dance-floor like a bag of washing.

Apart from waddling on as the back of a pantomime horse, or being fired from a cannon, there seems little more the woman can do to help fill the 90 seconds which are normally devoted to dance.

Wagner, meanwhile, has caterwauled in about five different styles and managed to make them all sound identical.

Indeed, the producers have taken to giving him abbreviated versions of two songs each week in the vain hope one of them might sound vaguely familiar. To date, none has.

Now the clamour is building for the Widdy/Wagner axis to actually win their respective shows and thereby expose once and for all the fundamental flaw in programmes which make millions from phone votes – people power.

The source of this mischievous momentum is social networking sites, which are busy encouraging millions to exercise their influence and make a mockery of both shows.

I do hope they succeed.

The fixed and sickly smiles which would have to greet the ultimate triumph of Twinkletoes Widdicombe and Wagner the Wailer would be worth all these weeks of suffering.