I fully accept that particular idea may not to be people's taste. But I am confident that the principle of longer semi-finals will be. It's something that would be relatively easy to implement, and yet provide such a meaningful way to strengthen the brand of the event.
In fairness to World Snooker Tour, they've obviously recognised lately that the UK needs some new life breathed into it. Hence their decision last year for the top 16 players to head straight to the Barbican for the main stages, with 16 more players joining them through qualifying. And it definitely felt more special at the 2022 tournament than for some time.
To be candid, it's probably high time now that we stopped talking the event down. It has suffered setbacks over the years, as I've outlined here. But I'm not sure the decline has been as dramatic as many make out. It's still the UK Championship and we feel a strong connection to it.
There's no doubt that the tournament will beguile us all over the coming nine days. It's a wonderful time of year to be a snooker fan and the joys of York await.
It's a tough business tipping the winner of snooker tournaments nowadays. Mark Allen was the player of last season but hasn't been at the races in this 2023/24 campaign until his brilliant Champion of Champions triumph.
His record before last week's event was: first round, second round, first round, second round, quarter-final, first round, second round. But class is permanent, and Allen certainly showed plenty of that in Bolton, losing only eight frames all week.
To beat Judd Trump by a margin of 10-3 in the final, so soon after the Englishman enjoyed a memorable treble of successive tournament wins, really takes some doing.
Allen is one of those players that can easily go on a roll once he has a trophy in his cabinet. He's the defending UK champion going to York. One to avoid for all the others.
One of the many eternal fascinations of this sport is how a player can have a relatively prosaic snooker career and then burst into life in their thirties.
Zhang Anda is the latest example of that. He'd had a few half decent tournament runs over the years, but absolutely nothing hinting at what the 31-year-old would do this season.
Zhang followed up his run to the English Open final in Brentwood last month – he lost to Judd Trump despite being well clear – with a superb victory at the International Championship.
How does it suddenly click after all those years? We were asking similar questions when the likes of Barry Hawkins and Stuart Bingham got off the mark. There's no reason to think this is just flash in the pan stuff either. Zhang has looked the real deal this autumn. This could be just the start for him.