You know that pain in your chest? That dull, throbbing pain that feels as heavy as a million suns? That’s because The X Factor is back on Saturday. It’s already back on Saturday. It’s August, and it’s British Summer Time, and outside is still full of happy people in thin clothing having fun, but The X Factor is back on Saturday. And it won’t let up until Christmas. That’s why your chest hurts so much.
Which means it’s time for me to list all the things The X Factor can do to make me watch it again. To reverse the six-year decline. To make me think of the phrase X Factor without visibly wincing. None of these things are likely, but here they are anyway. May God have mercy on us all.
Remember the kids
It started out as a television series where children dressed up in sparkly outfits and sang pop songs to each other. But children don’t watch television any more, so now it has mutated into a weird show where children dress up in sparkly outfits and sing songs from 25 years before they were born to a judging panel with a mean age of 55 that critiques them for the benefit of an adult audience only watching because it’s either that or Casualty. That’s just creepy. More than anything, if The X Factor wants to survive, it needs to reconnect with its original crowd.
Realistic expectations
Right from the word go, I guarantee that The X Factor will be full of wailing, snot-nosed idiots who keep loudly proclaiming that it is the answer to all their problems. No it isn’t you dummy. The best thing – the very best thing – you can expect to achieve by appearing on The X Factor is to release one middling album and then be dropped by your record company. That’s literally the best thing anyone can expect: brief, minor success followed by years of being crushed by your association with the show. If you’re asked why you want to win in 2016, at least be honest and admit it’s because you’re a fame-hungry leech.
Make it fun
Life is finite. Joy should be grasped wherever possible, for it is both rare and fleeting. Look at the Six-Chair Challenge, in which an auditorium of booing idiots force four millionaires to shatter the dreams of several teens as viciously as possible, and the whole thing is edited to look like a Japanese gameshow where the plot of When The Wind Blows is acted out to a roomful of toddlers with PTSD. That is the opposite of joy. It’s stressful and draining and, even for The X Factor, unnecessarily cruel. It is not something that people are happy about being made to watch. Wouldn’t it be great if The X Factor could just cut the hubris and have fun for once?
Shorter episodes
This weekend, The X Factor is on for two and a half hours. Two and a half poxy hours of basically the same footage – person enters room, person sings, person leaves room – repeated over and over until your brainstem shrinks into a nub. Two and a half hours that could be spent seeing people or doing something new or fixing your mum’s guttering. And it’ll only get worse. Once the live shows kick in, it’ll increase to nearly four hours a week. Your life is more important than that, I promise.
