And The Winner This Year Is... Simon Cowell

Over the years many people have failed. There are politicians, actors, newsreaders and even bin men who have failed so spectacularly that they have left lasting imprints on all of us. Yet none of their fails is even comparable, as insanely epic, or as groundbreaking as the fail that is… The X Factor.

 Yes on first impressions, this show has it all: Voiceover by E4 guy, Special effects doing the credits, and of course Simon Cowell. However, if you look below the surface, you find nothing but cheap primetime entertainment thought up by Simon Cowell and his haircut to extract money from phone lines.

Let’s start with the opening.

You start off with a presenter announcing over dramatically that we are about to watch a singing talent show. He even throws us a cheesy metaphor: Its time… To Face… THE MUSIC!!!! He didn’t exactly bother himself with his lines did he? He simply wrote down the first musically inclined thing that came into his head and barked it into a microphone.

However his crap puns do help a bit though. They help lower your expectations to a level suitable for the profit driven drivel that you will watch for the next hour, 2 hours sometimes. 6 years later, once the E4 voiceover man has finished his puns, you get the opening credits, which look like something you’d find in a Jeter Jackson movie. Complete with a soundtrack ripped off a 90’s pop flick. While this in itself is bad enough, would someone please tell me what a huge X hitting the earth has to do with a singing talent competition?

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. We’re assuming it can actually be called a show and not a televised karaoke night.

Oh wait it is. How it gets 21 million viewers is unbelievable. That’s a third of Britain.

But after the edifying spectacle of the X meteor, we get into the meat of the thing.

First stop for an ITV phone show is Ant and Dec. But since they bailed 3 years ago, we have to make do with crap understudy Dermot O Leary.

Now we get the judges. Inevitably we have record producer Simon Cowell, whose only claim to fame is that he’s a prize winning bastard. Next to him in Danni Minogue. Who doesn’t so much have a surname as a drunken Australian spelling mistake. Her claim to fame is that she’s the sister of real celebrity Kylie Minogue. Of course she had her own short career, but it was crap.

Then we have Cheryl Cole, star of Girls aloud. While she says she can sing, she has to mime at her performances. Even when she appeared on her own show she had to mime. So I’m sorry, but I’m a little sceptical as to whether she can actually sing or not.

Then, oh my god, you have Louis Walsh. The stereotypical Irishman stuck in at last minute to please Labour Commissionars on the grounds of race discrimination.

Ok. We have our (somewhat) competent panel of judges, so what about the contestants. As we all know, the audition stages are awash with idiots who are told by their fat sucker mums that they have unique angelic voices. The eye of that beholder obviously has their eyes shut though. Christ they’re awful.

But move onto the live rounds and you have a line-up mostly made up of people who can sing. Of course there’s always a joke slung in to please the stupid, or as was the case with Wagner, to please the commissionar, but there are many who could be envisioned with a vaguely successful career.

Too many actually, when I saw it I felt that each song was way too rushed, and I had no idea about any of the contestants. Surely if this was a movie it would fail without characterization, but there you go.

I am slightly wrong though; with all his wit, Cowell has realized the obvious and randomly assigned each person a back story.  

There are 3 choices. You’re doing this for your kids, who live in poverty, you’ve come so far in such a short time, or you simply have a life devoted to singing. They’re all good.

I could go on for so long about this program, but I haven’t the space. All I can say is that it is the worst thing ever imagined for TV. Not hopeless re-runs of failed 80s shows on Dave, documentaries for the old on BBC4, or even Jeremy Kyle come close to this. Everything about it feels like it was designed to torture the weak, to suck everything in your mind and replace it with stupid.

All with that all that’s left is to stop is to stop pretty boy cardle getting xmas number one, and instead buy Corey Taylor’s “X-M@$”. I know I have. Best of all, the money generated is apparently going to charity, rather than to finance the next series of what is undoubtedly Simon Cowell’s worst fail yet.