The X Factor’s desperation infects all who come near it ...
The bonkers and slightly desperate quality of The X Factor seems to have infected not only the judges and the contestants but also the guest performers. Cee-Lo Green appeared here (Saturday and Sunday, ITV1) as a giant one-man Chelsea Flower Show. Presumably someone thought this was some kind of incarnation of the carnival spirit. Instead it was like the opening credits of 1970s TV show The Banana Splits crossed with a bad acid trip.
With poor song choices, overstyling and terrifyingly dated choreography, this programme is not becoming any more bearable. This week’s theme – reinvention – was stupidly ill-defined, making it impossible for the mentors to give their contestants any proper guidance. Were they supposed to be reinventing the performers’ style? (If so, why? People usually reinvent themselves once they have been successful for a long time; we have known about these people for about three minutes.) Or were they supposed to be reinventing a known song? (If so, why choose many songs like Somewhere Over the Rainbow that have already been reinvented many times?) All the drama and emotion surrounding this week’s exit seemed fuelled by the fact that so little of this competition comes across as fair. I cannot be the only person who looks forward to the Talk Talk “BopHeads” adverts more than The X Factor itself.
Help! Doctor Who is still very confusing unless you know a lot about Doctor Who
Regular readers of this blog will know that your reviewer struggles with Doctor Who (Saturday, BBC1). Not because it is a bad programme. It is an excellent programme. But because she never feels as if she understands enough of the backstory to properly understand what the hell is going on. (Sorry, I will stop talking about myself in the third person.) I am one of the people who only started watching when Matt Smith was the Doctor. I have missed many, many years of information and am apt to get very confused. I continue to wonder if this is a flaw in Doctor Who: does it only really work for fans? Is it ever possible to catch up and watch it on the same level as an aficionado?
This week’s episode was less taxing than usual for the fly-by-night viewer. There was Double Clara (Real Clara and Zygon Clara) and generally a lot of Zygon action (shape-shifters who can “borrow” human forms). The point of all this? To allow the Doctor a long speech about how war is bad. The five-year-old in our house summed it up like this: “Clara is dead and has gone into another person’s body.” This wasn’t actually true – Clara is still alive. But it was pretty much the level I was watching on, too. I would not presume to tell the writers of Doctor Who to change a thing, because they evidently know what they’re doing. But I still feel as if I need to watch hundreds of the series’ previous box sets to understand a bloody thing.
Beware, Jeremy: the competition is starting to hot up on Strictly
Brace yourselves (possibly wearing one of the job lot of Charleston braces modelled by Peter Andre), Strictly Come Dancing (Saturday and Sunday, BBC1) is about to get nasty. The look on Kelly’s face when she was up for the dance-off … Was she Real Kelly or Zygon Kelly? She definitely went a bit Zygon.
This is the moment in Strictly – with only one episode to go before The Great Blackpool Reckoning – when everyone gets serious. And everyone suddenly gets angry with the joke contestants, (having previously adored them and voted for them en masse). If Carol had not been in the dance-off against Kelly, it would have been fascinating. There comes a moment in every series when a “joke” dancer ends up going through and a “serious” dancer is knocked out. John Sergeant ended up walking off the show when this happened. (I still can’t believe they allowed him to do this.)
It will be very interesting to see what happens with Jeremy Vine next week. Everyone adores him now, one minute doing zombie moves to Thriller, the next twirling his lasso astride a giant plastic horse. But will they love him quite as much when Jay and Aliona are up against Kelly and Kevin in the dance-off? It could happen very easily. It will be bloody and painful. I can’t wait.
