I've been going to the Booker prize on and off for 20 years. It's one of those annual milestones, like the Grand National or the party conferences that you come to both love and loathe. For as long as I can remember, too, it has been avidly televised. But not this year.

The Turner and Stirling prizes are both the subject of TV specials, but Booker has been downgraded. The result will be covered on the Ten O'clock News, like a horse race, which (frankly) is how most book commentators treat it now. So the headline news is Art 2, Books 0.