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Stepping Out offered the viewer both Dempsey and Makepeace (aka Glynis Barber and Michael Brandon) What’s not to like? (Picture: ITV)

There’s been a lot riding on ITV’s newest Saturday night venture, Stepping Out, given its blatant encroaching upon the sacred territory that is Strictly Come Dancing.

Yes, with BBC One’s annual ballroom blitz just days away from returning to screens (the launch show is next Saturday night in fact), the network has taken it upon themselves to come up with their own dance show in a bid to stomp all over Strictly’s well-manicured toes.

As it made its debut on Saturday night, though, we discovered that it’s rather a different creature.

For one thing it pairs its celebrities (who in this instance include the likes of Denise Welch, Laurence Llewellyn Bowen, the one from JLS who cried on telly and – for people of a certain age – Dempsey and Makepeace), with their real life partners, making for twice the inept fun as they struggle to master the steps.

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Brian McFadden attempted a ‘rock n’roll’ routine with wife Vogue Williams (Picture: ITV)

For another, this show’s not just restricted to the worlds of ballroom and Latin – which meant instead we had Denise Welch wiggling around in a jumpsuit (bizarrely adorned with pictures of herself) in an approximation of a disco routine, Llewellyn Bowen doing a middle-aged man’s interpretation of ‘street’ dance plus some sizzling tango action from Glynis Barber and Michael Brandon.

Entirely as predicted, there was a certain low-rent factor to all this. Let’s not forget this is the channel that in recent months have attempted to liven up our Saturday nights with the likes of Splash! and Your Face Sounds Familiar, in a desperate bid to maintain our attention while we while away the months between Britain’s Got Talent and The X Factor.

And of course it’s also the same channel which gave the world Dancing On Ice – which has long had a reputation as being Strictly with skates and a higher quotient of Emmerdale stars than its BBC One counterpart.

But while Stepping Out ultimately felt every bit as low-rent as its Saturday evening peers – the kind of TV equivalent of going out to buy Heinz baked beans and ending up with Asda Smartprice instead – it wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been.

OK, so we hid behind our hands on several occasions – at presenter Davina McCall’s own attempts to dance on to the stage, at Llewellyn Bowen’s attempts to even move coherently to the music, at the overly scaffolded set that looked as if it had been cobbled together from bits left over from every light entertainment show of the last decade.

But it was well-meaning enough (heck, even Jason Gardiner was quite nice for once), it actually provided a smattering of decent routines (well, Oritse Williams from JLS’s tap number anyway), and offered just enough glitz and sparkle to keep us distracted until Strictly comes along.

Whether or not it can drag any of those viewers away from the aforementioned when it debuts next Saturday, however, is another matter entirely.