Saturday 26 September 2009

X Factor: Improvements

Watching a really painful X Factor, for no other reason than I'm counting down the seconds until I see Chelsea get brutalised by Wigan on MOTD.

The early rounds of X Factor were formerly joyful. The beautiful, the arrogant, the gay, the young, the old, the bitter and twisted... and that's just the judges. But it's become enveloped in its own overproduction, so there's about five backing songs that are ALWAYS played. Chasing Cars when Jade, whose dad was killed by her mum after she found him sleeping with her hairdresser's aunt's dog, staggers out with snot dribbling down her face after getting through. You raise me up - always the bit where the key changes upwards - as four immaculately coiffeured and oiled ponces with a combined age of 47 dash from the stage like a cloakroom attendant when Cheryl Cole walks in. Etc etc.

And what's with the names this year: Rozelle? Janeice? And the truly egregious TreyC. They sound like medicines more than titles. And the group "Trucolorz" should be imprisoned for crimes against the English language, and forced to spend the rest of their lives listening to Jamie Oliver reading Shakespeare, or something equally ghastly.

Why do the contestants cry after getting through the first round? It would be like blubbering after realising you've got a job interview, which would just be bloody stupid.

And why do so many of them bring a tribe of supporters with them from whatever petri dish they were lurking in before? I swear one of them had the whole population of Salford with him in that stupid white booth where they vent their poisonous spleens after the performance. In a perfect world the walls would then have started moving in on them all, condensing them into a luscious chav soup to be fed to the other morons who enter the competition.

At the moment, when the herd is being culled, the singers are ushered into four rooms, each with 25 people. The judges shuffle in through a side door and announce the decisions. Two rooms will go through, two will leave. Cue crying (on both sides) and scenes of wild abandon in one, and glum dejecture in the other.

Personally I would prefer the losers to feel more like losers. I would like them to be taken outside, into a wide alleyway. It will be raining, and dark, apart from two flashlights beaming onto them. The judges appear on a gangplank above in raincoats. The decision is announced. The judges disappear. The lights dim, and there is only the sound of broken dreams, and crying. The filming reverts to those "sped-up" sequences, usually used to show the queuing competitors entering the arena. On this occasion however it would show muggers and junkies who had been rounded up before the show encircling the husks that were once "performers", before total annihilation. While "You Raise Me Up" plays.

Anyway it's finished, so rant over. I might send this off the ITV to see what they say.

No comments: