Media: All About ... The future for Five.

Will the ailing broadcaster find a life-saving soulmate?

Love hurts. In fact the whole relationship business can be terribly cruel - as indeed was amply illustrated during Five TV's most talked-about programme of the year to date, the edition of The Wright Stuff last week, where one-time pop star David Van Day dumped his girlfriend, The Sun reporter Sue Moxley, live on air.

Harsh. But perhaps it is better to have loved and lost than rarely to have loved at all - lonely, mocked and reduced in desperation to fluttering one's lashes at every prospect that passes by, no matter how unlikely (though we speak from no personal experience of this, it must be understood).

Which is, of course, exactly the sort of situation that lovelorn Five has found itself in. It all began back at the tail end of last year when deteriorating market conditions increased the desperate determination of Channel 4 to ends its (not always entirely splendid) isolation.

Channel 4 needs to find a way to plug what had already been identified as a widening gap between its income and its aspirations to produce distinctive public service programmes - and the solution it favoured was to find some sort of union with the BBC.

By the turn of the year, however, with Five realising it was facing similarly horrendous deficit problems, it began spoiling this fine romance by setting its cap at Channel 4. This seemed an unlikely proposition. And not just because Andy Duncan, the chief executive, and his counterpart at Five, Dawn Airey, would make an extremely implausible couple - the two institutions are (if you believe the gospel according to Channel 4) as culturally incompatible as oil and water.

But it wasn't long before that water was muddied - and a low point was reached when the executive chairman of ITV, Michael Grade, not previously known to be an advocate of troilism, proposed a menage a trois, with ITV, Channel 4 and Five becoming one.