Why The X Factor Is Rubbish Part 893, or What Is The Least Number Of Steps It Will Take Me To Link T

It’s Saturday night, and I am hunkering down, laptopped and headphoned, once more trying to burrow even further underneath the bunker to avoid the X Factor, working hard to ensure my ablution / fridge breaks are perfectly timed to coincide with the adverts.

My gripes are many and varied, but my main gripe at the moment is less to do with the usual parade of vacuity than it is to do with the increasingly exposed lies and deceits at the heart – no, let’s say the centre, for accuracy’s sake- of the show, and the shameful acceptance of this by the public. The show itself illustrates the gaping void within our cultural soul vividly enough without society itself also proving to be a spineless accessory to this fallacious monstrosity.

It’s been the same for ages – the shots of thousands of hopefuls in the crowd, very few of whom get anywhere near to Cowell and whichever of his drones he decides to sit with that week despite the set up being very much one of ‘it could be anyone’ ; the Auto-tune debacle, which I still can’t work out whether we should be angry or thankful about in all honesty ; the until-last-year pantomime of the Xmas number one; the whole ‘audition’ shtick that has been bought for years and years. An audition is when people with a talent are given the chance to display that talent in order to then display it to a wider audience; what The X Factor does is casting…….the producers have predefined roles (including, but not limited to, being mentally ill, scarred by tragedy, ‘wacky and zany’, a repressed homosexual and being preternaturally annoying) and then look for people to fit those, and if they can sing a bit that’s a bonus. If not they can just Auto-tune it out (oh, hang on…..).

I’m not that much of a dreamer – the genie is well and truly out of the bottle, so I concede that we will continue to have these atrocity parades on our screens, but if so can they not at least retain a semblance of morality? Or will that only come when their viewers demand it of them? The juggernaut continues to roll on, yet in the light of the hand wringing about other corruption scandals of recent and current times, you might think we would be a little more attuned to examining anything that was even a tinge dodgy/corrupt. Although selective morality is as much a British staple as casual racism and a mistrust of the French, so what should we expect in a nation where newspapers are constantly champing at the bit to put potential paedophiles on their front pages, just a page or two before the just-turned 16 year old with her top off ; in a nation where our elected representatives tried to legally remove the head of RBS’s pension even though it was contractually agreed (however unpalatable that may be), but then tried to use the same ‘we didn’t break any rules’ excuses to justify their expense excesses ; in a nation where pranks that get out of hand elicit complaints from people who never actually heard them in sufficient numbers for people to lose jobs, and entire broadcasting organisations are forced to embark on a veritable crusade of censorship in what is ostensibly a democracy.

But then again, as long as we can laugh at those ‘auditions’ every year, people will be happy, right? As Orwell could have said, “Obedience is not enough…..If you want a picture of the future, imagine a great big flying X smashing into a human face – for ever”.