Will the women of The X Factor stop perving?

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.