The X Factor is back on ITV, and it’s fascinating, being a paradigm of British life.
The X Factor is back on ITV, and it’s fascinating, being a paradigm of British life. Persons of little or no talent are assembled to be jeered. Those who have a modicum of ability are praised as if they had just sung Wagner’s Liebestod faultlessly at Covent Garden. This audience would applaud Beachcomber’s Directory of Huntingdonshire Cabmen if whoever was reading it remembered to tear up around the letter B.
Rather like in Nineteen Eighty-Four we have the two minutes of hate followed by a great wave of sentimentality, as if a knickerbocker glory packed with cream and raspberry sauce had been laced with castor oil. ‘The X Factor gives everyone a chance to be a star,’ says the voice-over. No, it doesn’t. It gives anyone the chance to be humiliated. Or adored, as if 100 Labradors were licking their face.
‘Tina Turner is a huge inspiration to me,’ said the first contestant. But Tina Turner is a slim, black American woman with a superlative voice. He was a fat, bearded Glaswegian who couldn’t sing and who danced like a beached whale that thinks it might just have a chance to get back to sea. He sang ‘Disco Inferno’, badly. Perhaps because he reminded them of themselves, the audience leapt to their feet applauding — what?
Next we had some people who had been picked merely so that we could mock them. Simon Cowell told one group that they sounded as if they had just met at a bus stop somewhere. He was wrong. Almost any random group of bus passengers could have done better.
They don’t just barrack the performers. One judge, Geri Halliwell of the Spice Girls, was torn apart for talking too much.
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