More spots than talent ... The McDonald brothers
If you watched the X-Factor on Saturday night you might have noticed that, in amongst the judges' theatrical bickering, a genuinely tetchy exchange took place between Sharon Osbourne and Simon Cowell. It came after a performance by the McDonald Brothers, two wedding singers from Scotland who have somehow survived the weekly cull to find themselves in the hideous position of having to perform each Saturday night in front of 11 million people when they have scarcely enough talent for a crowd of 11, ten of them close relatives.
Last Saturday, after listening to the brothers sing Robbie Williams' She's the One, Cowell asserted that they couldn't possibly win the competition, to which Sharon Osbourne smirkingly replied that if they did win, Cowell would have to give them a £1m record deal, as per competition rules. This, said Cowell, was a "very silly" remark indeed and he was so visibly annoyed by it that a bright white light shot instantly from the TV and illuminated a course of action the irresistibility of which I can only compare to finding a discarded brick outside the plate glass frontage of a Foxtons estate agents.
For your pleasure and delight, here it is again: the fact that, barring any get-outs in the small print, if the whey-faced, tin-voiced, mortuary-eyed McDonald Brothers win the X-Factor, Simon Cowell will have to give them a million pounds.
I should say at this point that I have a soft spot for Cowell, who for all his dorkiness is one of the few people on TV who actually says what he thinks and is right to disabuse bad singers of the conviction they're any good. The X-Factor is a show based on contempt and public humiliation and the slimiest aspects of human nature, all of which is fine as long as we don't pretend it's about anything else (like talent-spotting). The most value we can get from it, therefore, is a result that turns some of that contempt back on its makers. So pass it on for Saturday: vote, vote repeatedly, vote McDonald Brothers.
