How excited are you about the May versus Corbyn TV debate? Face it, it’s the Argentina-West Germany final you dream of. This ends in some shiny-floor Blunderdome, probably on the BBC, as the prime minister and leader of the opposition fight for positions neither of them remotely believes in.

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Behold them enter the Bollocksseum, and say disingenuous things solely designed to maintain their electoral coalition, as though that was the solution, and not literally the thing that got us here. That we should be repeating the pantomime even at the 11th hour suggests the condition is terminal. Are you not entertained? ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?

No? Too bad. You don’t get a vote anyway.

Embarrassingly, both the Tory and Labour leaderships have failed to understand even the timeslot. In the years BC (Before Cowell), Sunday nights obeyed a rigid broadcasting law. All ITV programmes had to be either Heartbeat, spin-offs from Heartbeat (The Royal; The Royal Today) or have heart in the title (Where the Heart Is; Wild at Heart). After the coming of the Karaoke Sauron, this world died violently and we entered the waste spaces. So now, Sunday night on both major channels is shiny-floor shows. Sunday night is the X Factor sing-off, or the Strictly dance-off. Sunday night couldn’t happen without a public vote.

Except for the Brexit debate, apparently. An audience that has spent 15 years of the endtimes deciding which contestant marooned on a soundstage they want to save is now supposed to sit back and have no say on the comparatively trivial matter of our national destiny.

Then again, we’re here because Theresa May isn’t the personality type to pull a Simon Cowell and say, “You know what? I’m saving Little Mix/the orphan ventriloquist/the United Kingdom, even though it’s not what the public voted for. Because the alternative is Jedward/a guy in camo who burps No Surrender/disunited penury.” Even Cowell, once such a cocky sorcerer’s apprentice that he imagined a politics show where he ran a referendum every week, last year fumed he was done with a public vote on who makes the Britain’s Got Talent finals.

Encouragingly, the Brexit debate is already a row about which channel the talent will appear on. May wants the BBC. But Jeremy Corbyn wants ITV because “the timing looked good”. I enjoyed the way he said it, like he’s a lot bigger than stooping to inherit the audience from Doctor Who. He and May could instead gift their ratings to I’m a Celebrity, a plucky little show that I’m sure would gratefully welcome the boost.

Were the debate on ITV, I’d love to see which advertisers bought a slot. European car manufacturers with money to burn, presumably. But purely in terms of summary justice, I wish it could be shown in the brutal marketplace of American network television, where shows have been pulled before the first commercial break if they’re not getting the numbers. I wonder how many times May would get to say “taking back control” before the affiliates took back control of their bottom line and switched to a Friends rerun.

Play Video 1:48 'The most shambolic government in living memory,' says Jeremy Corbyn – video

May has spent most of this week writing the ultimate positive break-up song about the way we’re splitting from the EU. “The deal is the deal,” she philosophised. “We’re going to be very good friends.” Thank u, next. Obviously, media trainers will be coaching Theresa May to say “Thank u, next” in a way so awkwardly au courant that it will convince 20 million people to storm their MPs’ offices and demand they back her deal.

Political TV debates bring out the very worst in everyone, from the number four at No 10 – who gets to scream down the phone about what his client will or won’t do – to broadcasters, who take an already sordid thing and work desperately to make it into a snuff movie. The post-debate spin room is the very darkest iteration of the British belief that American things are big and cool. You get a room full of party spinners acting like they’re in a dogfight for Michael Dukakis’s campaign future, when in fact they’re in the music-and-movement space of a Bristol arts centre trying to convince Kay Burley that Tim Farron didn’t just say the imbecilic thing millions of people saw him say.

Corbyn, meanwhile, wants the I’m a Celebrity final treated with kid gloves. “Maybe I want to watch it,” he told Phillip Schofield. Maybe. But beware. Arguably any discussion of telly is the most dangerous territory for British politicians. It is a subject on which the rest of the population is infinitely more expert, and on which even opening their mouths reveals MPs as the unsettling weirdos they mostly are.

Take May’s answers to a simple quiz last year. Sherlock or Midsomer Murders? “I’ve watched both.” I mean … this is not a complicated format, prime minister. But still, on to the next choice: Broadchurch or Line of Duty? “I haven’t watched either.” Boris Johnson fared similarly in the same spot a couple of months ago. Bodyguard or Killing Eve? “I haven’t seen either of them.”

And when they do know something about telly, it’s far, far worse. Michael Gove on Game of Thrones was quite excruciating. Here he is on Tyrion Lannister – except not really on Tyrion Lannister, one suspects. “You see there that this misshapen dwarf, reviled throughout his life, thought in the eyes of some to be a toxic figure, can at last rally a small band of loyal followers.” Oh my God. The thought of having to watch Michael play the game of thrones again is too grimly hilarious for words. But you know what? It’s coming.

It’s all coming. If it’s crap, it’s in the post. Speaking of The X Factor, former judge Sharon Osbourne famously mails her own excrement to people who have displeased her. If you doubt it now, you won’t after the debate: we have become the sort of country that posts shit to itself.

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist