According to Forbes, her fee for hosting the show - which she typically does four days a week (guests host the fifth), recording the episodes over two days - is around $US50 million a year. Whatever the causes, the decline of Ellen would have hurt broadcaster NBC, for whom the show is a seriously expensive proposition. The online warriors might claim this decline as a victory, some going so far as to hand the laurels to actor Dakota Johnson, who called DeGeneres’ bluff on a birthday party invitation she may or may not have been issued in 2019, but there are other possible - indeed likely - explanations: a tiring format that is facing fresh competition (from Kelly Clarkson and Drew Barrymore among others) the absence of the live studio audience whose whooping and dancing were such a critical element of the show’s appeal (audience faces on TV screens on chairs just do not cut it) the decline in ad and marketing spending by all businesses due to the pandemic.

At any rate, only the most exacting could consider the recent line-up anything less than A-list with Pink, Keith Urban, Oscar nominee Andra Day and Oprah Winfrey among those appearing. There were claims of sponsors abandoning the show, and of celebrities becoming harder to book, though that may have owed as much to the lack of content as to a collective cold shoulder (actors tend to appear only when they have a movie out, and most blockbusters are still gathering dust on the shelves because of COVID).

The backlash may have exacerbated the decline but the truth is the numbers had been trending down for years, from a high in 2014-15 of almost 4 million per episode.

Its key demographic - women under 54 - were turning off too, with a decline of 38 per cent. In March, Nielsen ratings figures showed Ellen had dropped even further, its audience shedding 1.1 million viewers (down from 2.6 million to 1.5 million per day).

What happened to ellen degeneres