Will the women on ITV’s The X Factor (Saturday) stop perving? I suppose there are two ways to tackle the issue of gender equality — one is to dictate that nobody mention sexuality at all; the other is to make females slobber over the males the way men purportedly slobber over women all the time. The women judges of The X Factor are lurching towards the latter. ‘I’ve got my eye on you,’ Sharon Osbourne winked at a contestant, Nicholas McDonald. He is 15. She made him repeat the words ‘nearly sixteen’, because he pronounced it ‘sex-teen’. Young Nicholas is being sexualised before our eyes. ‘Tonight’s the first night I noticed those baby-blue eyes of yours,’ cooed ex-Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger, rallying the ladies in the audience to agree with her.
Male judge Louis Walsh got in on the act last week, when the theme was love songs. Little Nick is so young he’s never fallen in love, and Louis was worried he may not deliver a romantic ballad with sufficient frisson. He got sexy Nicole to drop in on a practice session to ‘inspire’ the lad. She hugged him. Imagine if a man had been roped in to do this to a teenage girl contender! When Nicholas performed his song on stage — ‘She’s the One’ — he was surrounded by leggy female dancers, and the act ended with a sultry temptress sidling up to him. Even Osbourne said she was shocked. (Though her comment that the temptress-dancer was a ‘paedophile’ may have been going too far.)
TV is the home of moral ambiguity. It’s a soapbox for people to express political and social views, but its visual aspect means looks and sex are paramount. Plunging bravely into another ethical faultline was BBC2’s Ambassadors (Wednesday), which is about foreigners in a little-known Central Asian nation.
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