I’m writing this on the assumption that you didn’t watch X Factor this weekend. Because you didn’t, did you? Your life is short, you’re not being subjected to a form of Clockwork Orange-style aversion therapy by a sinister cabal of scientists and there was a programme about fish on the other side.
And that’s just as well. Because, if you did watch X Factor, you probably would have found yourself being baffled to the very point of unconsciousness. The first of this year’s live shows began on Saturday, and with them came some format changes so infuriatingly labyrinthine that they even managed to outfox the show’s own host.
X Factor has never been good, but at least you always knew where you stood with it. On Saturday, there would be a punishing three-hour mediocrity marathon. Then on Sunday, the two least popular acts would shout a power ballad and Louis Walsh would shun any sort of responsibility by forcing a deadlock. Again, not impressive, but reliable.
But now? Now, the whole thing has been hurled out of the window. Now, in this brightly coloured hellscape where up is down and down is up, some acts sing on Saturday and some acts sing on Sunday, but someone gets eliminated on each day nevertheless. Also, the judges don’t choose who gets eliminated any more, but there is still a sing-off, only now it’s a sing-off between the contestants who received the most votes and, instead of being kicked off, they’re now singing to win a prize. I think. I can’t state any of this with complete certainty, of course, because I haven’t yet received my PhD in advanced quantum pointlessness.
The whole thing is 400 times more complicated than it needs to be. It’s the worst kind of complicated, too; misguidedly thinking it’s actually solving something. It’s the TV equivalent of the Anglian Windows CEO leaning into a downturn by making new windows out of ectoplasm, and forcing people to buy them using a combination of illegal cryptocurrency and a memorised 48-stanza Esperanto incantation about the 12th-century Danish clergyman Valdemar Knudsen.
Worse, these changes only serve to highlight the artifice at the heart of X Factor. Now that all the big decisions are made exclusively by the public, the judges no longer serve any purpose whatsoever. You may as well replace them with a pile of eggs for all they good they do. And yet they’re still there, offering the same nonsense drawn-out, faux-agonised decision-making processes they always did, even though it transparently achieves nothing. It’s a study in comprehensive impotence, performed by idiots for an audience of nobody.
Even Dermot O’Leary fell afoul of this needless bureaucracy on Saturday, telling one singer that she had won a prize – in this instance, a flight to New York to help Pink promote her new album – before realising that she was still only at stage one of this absurd Readers Digest Prize Draw of a kerfuffle, and therefore still had a full day of redundant dead-eyed hoop-jumping to force herself through before she could claim this moronic anti-reward.
And this is Dermot O’Leary we’re talking about, for crying out loud. He’s the most reliable pair of hands in the entire television industry. You could drop him into any situation at the very last minute – like when Terry Wogan fell ill before Children in Need two years ago – and he’ll be the very picture of genial unflappability. The man is fazed by nothing. But X Factor’s dumb new rulebook was a step too far. By the end of Saturday’s episode, he looked exhausted and punchdrunk. That’s how bad the new format is. It has turned Dermot O’Leary into Olly Murs.
Clearly, this is X Factor in its death throes. The rule changes are a sudden burst of misdirected energy before the whole thing rolls over and expires. Even more than usual, X Factor is unwatchable. It’s like witnessing a television programme called 127 Hours cutting its own arm off in full view of the public. It can’t go on. It shouldn’t go on. Go home, X Factor. You’re embarrassing yourself.
