Until this week, there’s every chance that you didn’t know who Natalia Kills and Willy Moon were, nor that they happened to be judges on the New Zealand version of X Factor. You might not even have known that there was a New Zealand version of X Factor, because life is short and time is precious and even retaining the knowledge that they’ve got X Factor in New Zealand seems like a profound reinforcement of all the better things you could be doing with your existence.
If that’s the case, sorry. But their story deserves to be brought up, because what happened in New Zealand is a good reflection of what’s happening everywhere else.
Kills and Moon were, until very recently, a husband and wife judging team on New Zealand’s X Factor. Then they were sacked for bullying a contestant. On the evening of 15 March – after a relatively unmemorable performance – Kills piled in on the dress sense of contestant Joe Irvine, accusing him of copying her husband’s look and calling him “creepy” and “disgusting” in the process. Then Moon added his own thoughts, which were – genuinely – “I feel like you’re going to stitch someone’s skin to your face and then kill everybody in the audience.”
Following an uproar, including distancing statements from the show’s sponsors and now a petition, Kills and Moon were shown the door. All of which brings the role of the talent show judge in the year 2015 into question.
Arguably, the entire talent show genre was built on insults. Though they’d never admit it, people tuned in to shows such as Pop Idol specifically to see Simon Cowell hurl abuse at a parade of undeserving saps. During his career, Cowell has suggested that people might throw rocks at a substandard singer, that a man’s singing voice probably contributed to the break-up of his marriage, and that one contestant looked “like the Incredible Hulk’s wife”.
And, as the Idols and the X Factors and the Got Talents – and their unrelated offshoots about dancing and skating and diving – have multiplied around the world, this is the blueprint that would-be judges have seized upon. Sit at a desk, roll out a barrage of horrific personal insults and grow in infamy with every tirade of boos you receive.
However, the art of the talent show critique has moved on, and Kills and Moon haven’t noticed. Even Cowell – who was almost unique in being able to get away with his insults because of his campily theatrical tone – has changed, long ago trading in his one-note viciousness for a slightly chummier brand of weary gloom.
The most popular shows of recent years have all adopted a gradual nicening. Cowell’s American Idol replacement was Ellen DeGeneres, who is essentially a grin on a stick. The Voice has managed to last longer than expected, purely because its no-nastiness rule has been enforced to an absurd degree. The Great British Bake Off is niceness personified, to the extent that the sight of a man putting a cake in a dustbin last year was considered shocking enough to make actual front-page news.
The problem with the Kills and Moon tirade isn’t so much the insult itself, but the tone of it. They’re not even a photocopy of the Cowell blueprint any more; they’re a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy; any trace of nuance and humanity has gradually been blasted away until nothing’s left but spite for spite’s sake. They don’t look amused, or even irritated, by what they’re saying. It’s entirely rote. They deserved to be fired, but only because they weren’t trying hard enough.
Combine this with the change in tastes with the movement to launch a petition against anything that might cause any kind of upset, and Natalia Kills and Willy Moon never stood a chance. But that’s OK. They were dinosaurs. Nobody will miss them and, besides, it means more air time for Mel Blatt. Remember Mel Blatt? She’s a judge on New Zealand X Factor too. Who knew?
