The X Factor live shows begin this weekend, with 12 acts left in the running to become the next big singing sensation. Only one of them can make it, against all odds, in the face of fierce competition and greatly enhanced media scrutiny.
The only problem is that I don’t know who any of them are.
I haven’t been watching X Factor this year. I watched 15 minutes of one episode a fortnight ago by accident, but that’s it. Which is obviously great for me, because having liveblogged my way through all the previous series, I feel like a newly escaped hostage. However, I’ve still managed to retain enough residual X Factor knowledge to know exactly where each of the finalists will come based purely on their publicity photographs. Witness my eerie skills of prediction, then applaud accordingly.
Last place: Saara Aalto
Poor Saara Aalto. The woman is basically a walking litany of everything X Factor viewers dislike. She’s kooky, but not kooky enough to qualify as a Genuine Eccentric. She’s too old (at least by X Factor’s relentlessly youth-fixated worldview) to pass as eye candy. Her name is very slightly unconventional. Alas Saara, we’ll barely get to know you.
Eleventh: Ryan Lawrie
Adhering to the purview that every young male X Factor finalist has to look like the cover star of a fictional teen magazine called No Genitals, here’s Ryan Lawrie. His hair is floppy, his smile is wet, he looks like he has been dressed by someone’s aunt and I’d imagine that he has a voice like a gnat peeing into a hurricane. This competition will not be kind to him.
Tenth: 5 After Midnight
The X Factor producers cannot possibly allow a group such as 5 After Midnight to succeed, because it would inspire a rush of other groups named after weirdly specific times of day to enter X Factor. Imagine how miserable the 2017 series would be if everyone was called Twenty to Three or Two Thirteen AM. I predict that Louis Walsh will deliberately scupper their chances early on by forcing them to sing a reggae medley of Funky Town and My Boy Lollipop.
Ninth: Relley C
Themed episodes will be in full effect by week four. I predict that this is when Relley C, during a Tin-Foil Dance Music week rendition of Do It Loud by The Maniac Agenda, will give up halfway through and just go for a job as a chorus singer in The Lion King musical instead.
Eight: Bratavio
With a name that sounds a bit like a lingerie company and a bit like an anonymous east European town, Bratavio were never destined to do very well. At this point in the series, Simon Cowell will start grumping on about the leftover novelty acts in the competition and Bratavio – as the least annoying novelty act in the finals – will be the first to succumb to his wrath.
Seventh: Freddy Parker
X Factor is clearly a stepping stone for Freddy Parker, a notch to help him accomplish his ultimate dream of presenting a series about funny dogs on Cbeebies. Seventh place is all he needs to achieve this, and then he’ll vanish like a puff of nice-haired smoke.
Sixth: Honey G
It seems as if Honey G is this year’s joke entry. This might be because she looks like a Catherine Tate character called Harrowing Mum, or it could be because she sounds like she has been named after a low-value brand of throat disinfectant. Either way, unless she pulls a Rhydian and reveals at the last minute that she can sing like Harry Secombe, expect her novelty to burn out halfway through.
Fifth: Brooks Way
The Bratz Doll Jedward. This will all be fun and games until they crawl into your dreams at night and jerk around like marionettes with blood pouring from their gaping mouths.
Fourth: Sam Lavery
At this point, before the pressures of the live shows kick in, Sam Lavery looks like the girl who everyone can relate to. This means that, after two months, she’ll have been earmarked as an antisocial bully who ruined Brooks Way’s innocence and then punched Honey G in the face.
Third: Matt Terry
You know how, in every reality show, there’s a character so inherently anonymous that they make it to the latter stages of the competition purely because everyone watching had forgotten that they even existed? This is Matt Terry though and through. He is destined to be the pub-quiz question that nobody ever gets right.
Runner-up: Gifty Louise
Gifty Louise looks like the most talented, contemporary and commercially viable artist in the final 12. She’ll have got this far with a sequence of breathtaking performances and endless hyperbolic feedback from the X Factor judges. The poor woman is doomed to finish second.
Winner: Emily Middlemass
Sure, she might not be the best, or the most original, performer on X Factor. But she’s reliable, and she smiles a lot, and she’ll look good crying during her second performance of the winner’s single. Congratulations Emily Middlemas! May the one album you release before you’re ignominiously dropped from your record label not be a miserable embarrassment.
