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For those who have not seen the show – if, like me, you watch American Idol and know you must choose one reality show per genre and avoid all others for fear of incurring irreparable brain damage – The Voice is a “blind audition” show. Four dubious stars – Christina Aguilera, Blake Shelton, Adam Levine and Green – imperiously listen to ugly people sing, while sitting in gigantic red Starship Enterprise chairs with their backs turned.

They then meet the uggos and marvel, then fight over them in order to form winning teams in a super-positive version of the age-old sadism that is choosing sides for gym class.

I remember early promos for the shows that advanced the idea, via Levine, that, before music videos, “in the 1970s” there were a lot of “sketchy-looking people [who] had gorgeous voices.”

Levine’s logic is, of course, completely warped. In the 1970s, there were album covers, fan magazines and concerts. The Beatles did very well with female fans, despite the infrequent visuals; Elvis Presley never shot a video in his life but women are still throwing their panties at the Meditation Garden in Graceland.

Okay, these stars are good-looking, but the “sketchy-looking” people still often succeed: Is The Voice trying to suggest that the well-upholstered Cee Lo is doing well because of his good looks?

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His triumphal miserablism, which many critics find innovative, reads to me as familiar Canadian passive-aggression, at least when Nicki Minaj or Rihanna isn’t around to snap him out of it. Kanye did it first and better. It was such a relief to see the mopey meanness of “Marvin’s Room” get its comeuppance from answer songs like JoJo’s.

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Even in 1960, when the Queen was heavily pregnant with the Duke of York, she told premier Harold Macmillan that she needed to “revisit” the issue of the family name, which “had been irritating her husband since…1952”. In an article for the current issue of Vanity Fair magazine, the author cites an entry in Macmillan’s diary, in which he wrote: “The Queen only wishes (properly enough) to do something to please her husband - with whom she is desperately in love. “What upsets me … is the Prince’s almost brutal attitude to the Queen over all this.” He added: “I shall never forget what she said to me that Sunday night at Sandringham.” Macmillan passed the problem on to his deputy, Rab Butler, and the lord chancellor Lord Kilmuir. Butler told Macmillan in a telegram that the Queen had “absolutely set her heart” on making a change for Philip’s sake. Miss Bedell Smith writes: “By one account, Butler confided to a friend that Elizabeth had been ‘in tears’.

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The vote appears to be the latest manifestation of grassroots Euroscepticism. Although no reason was given for the proposal to “de-twin”, Lib Dems say it stems from a visceral Tory hatred for the European Union. Two other rightwing councils – Doncaster, south Yorkshire, and Wallingford in Oxfordshire – have in recent years also voted to kill off twinning arrangements. … Bishop’s Stortford’s Conservative leader, John Wyllie, denied this. He claimed the council ended links with the continent because of “lack of interest”. The twinning committee would continue but the council would no longer be involved, he said. He admitted he had missed out on trips to Friedberg and Villiers-sur-Marne when he was mayor, but joked: “I’m not bitter and twisted.” Asked whether Euroscepticism lurked behind the decision to dump the Europeans, Wyllie was indignant. “It had nothing to do with that. This is just typical Lib Dem rhetoric. They are playing party politics,” he said. He added sarcastically: “It’s nice to see that they [the Lib Dems] have their finger on the pulse. People are losing their jobs in this town and all they care about is twinning.