#oneaday, Day 216: I Wish The X Was Ex

So I believe the new series of The X-Factor kicked off tonight. I’m saying this purely based on a few comments on Twitter that I happened to witness earlier on, and not by having watched it at all. The reason I don’t watch it? The X-Factor incites the kind of burning rage and despair at society that is matched only by how I feel during major football tournaments. It’s one of the main reasons I don’t watch TV at all. Not The X-Factor specifically. But shows like it. And by God there are a lot of them.

And they’re always the same. It’s all very well saying that it’s Just Entertainment, and that other forms of entertainment are just as guilty of the offences that The X-Factor commits.

But no. The X-Factor is pretty much identical every year, bar a couple of minor alterations to the format and the inevitable fake “controversy” over who is going to be a judge.

We start with the auditions. Everyone who watches the show uses the auditions section as the main reason to convince people who don’t watch the show to watch the show. “It’s funny!” they’ll say. “There are really shit people sometimes!”

If I want to watch shit people singing, I’ll go direct a school choir. I don’t need it on my television. And it’s not funny. It’s just embarrassing. Yes, these people did it to themselves by signing up for the show. But there’s no need for the “clever editing” (hah!) that goes into the show to focus on them quite so much. And what are we supposed to think? The show inevitably builds them up with one of its famous sob stories, then knocks them down flat when the judges decide to brand them “awful”. What are we, as viewers, supposed to take away from that? “Hah! Look! This person’s had an awful life! But they’re shit at singing and quite ugly, so let’s laugh at them and their misfortune! They’re going to die alone!”

Then, as I recall, there are “Boot Camp” sections, where the judges get to show us all how obnoxiously rich they are out as a result of the clone armies they’ve built over the years. This is ostensibly the “training” section, where the performers get to learn how to, well, perform better. Funny how we rarely see much in the way of training. Instead, we see when they fuck it up, because that’s Better Television.

After that we’re into the interminable, never-ending live shows. Every week, the remaining grinning idiots, who have had all semblance of personality sandblasted out of them by this point, come on stage, sing an incredibly twee and wet version of an existing song, listen to some “criticism” from the judges (which inevitably involves one or more of the key phrases “I liked it”, “I think you could be the next big thing”, “You’ve got the X-Factor”, “You… could win this show” or equivalents towards the negative end of the spectrum) which doesn’t actually offer any constructive advice at all, and then bugger off the stage either crying or going “YES!”

During the live shows, the black woman with the incredibly powerful voice will inevitably almost get to the final and then not quite make it. The “novelty act” which everyone thinks is Really Funny will be kept in for an inexplicably long time, despite being a one-joke act who don’t actually have any talent whatsoever. During the final, the performer who is the better singer will be kicked out in favour of the performer who is more generic and boring. And during the final, the “Winner’s Single” will be revealed to be a dirge-like ballad that makes everyone who listens to it want to kill themselves.

After the show has finished, the Winner’s Single will be released, it will sell like the proverbial hot cakes for a few weeks then disappear without trace for at least six months, after which time the winner will then release their “Stunning Debut Album!” by which time the whole world has forgotten who they are, at least it would have had they not been in the tabloids and on Sky News every five minutes every time they pick their bum or scratch their nose. As a result of this, the obsessive fans become like the people I talked about yesterday, and the people who don’t watch the show and have no time for manufactured pop nonsense are about ready to commit an act of terrorism.

So there you go. I’ve saved you having to watch it at all this year. The X-Factor can fuck off and burn in a fire.