Bastardisation of the East: Viewers sob while S.O.B.s judge: It's the X Factor

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Viewers sob while S.O.B.s judge: It's the X Factor

What was I thinking? I'll never know for sure, but yesterday I saw a bit of the X Factor and I was even more disgusted than I could ever have guessed.

By now I'm pretty familiar with how this bullshit goes. Having whittled down all the contestants, including the delusional comedy dross, down to almost single figures, the show now moves to a Big Brother like format where each week they each sing one song per week. There is a relatively pointless bit after every performance where the judges line up to tell the contestant what they thought, though in truth we either get embarassingly over-the-top platitudes or unseemly abuse. That's half the reason people watch, in case you really didn't know. I say that these little outbursts from the panel are relatively pointless because it is the public vote that "saves" the majority of their favourite performers for another week, the exception being the two lowest scoring ones, who are condemned to a rather undignified head to head battle, where they sing another song of their own choosing.

So far it sounds like a singing competition and the sort of guff that a family could watch together and enjoy. I've watched paint dry and I promise that the X-Factor beats it hands down. Sure, the judges can be a bit rude, it's tacky and having a 'Big Band/Swing' week is a tad daft since most of the contestants are just out of school and shouldn't be made to sing banal drivel that even made Frank Sinatra sound older than he really was when he sung it. But nothing too offensive can come of this kind of entertainment and you weren't going to miss those few extra brain cells anyway.

Aaah, but there is the added element to this show, the real 'X-Factor' you could call it. While we could pretend that this is a singing competition, we all know that it is welded inextricably to a popularity contest, and this complicates matters because we are crossing over disciplines. Appealing to people with your voice is a very different kettle of fish to making them like you on a personal level, isn't it Ms Mariah Carey? This is where the personal lives of the contestants compromise the aim of the show and pevert the outcome. Or, in the case of yesterday's show, they add a very twisted almost exploitative subplot to what should be Saturday night zombievision.

Daniel is a 38 year-old pool cleaner with an above average voice, and he clearly wants to be famous. That's a not unreasonable demand to make these days, and it saves you doing a lot of hard work to earn money too. Phew! But he has obstacles that block his path, for the insidious Simon Cowell doesn't like his style and is quite content to tell him this in pointed terms since bolstering his hardman persona does his reputation no harm at all. After Daniel gave a fairly average performance (certainly when compared to some of the other rather gifted singers on the show) Simon Cowell, and the smug and buffoonish toad also known as Louie Walsh both slammed him, with Cowell coming out with some stinging remarks that were just not needed. You would have felt bad for Daniel, and his self-esteem would hardly have been raised later when the other finalists all came out to sing a charity single together and he was impeded by a technical fault with the door. The public didn't respond too well either, and Daniel found himself competing for his survival in a head-to-head with some surly 19 year old kid, who rather inconveniently also wanted to be famous. Wow, no room for compromise on this show. At this point Daniel used his trump card and performed a song in memory of his wife, who had passed away. It annihilated his competitor and convinced three of the four judges to give him a stay of execution because it was allegedly such an emotional and sincere tear-jerker. I say "allegedly" because there was no way in hell that I was going to subject myself to this sordid spectacle. Isn't grief traditionally a private matter? Maybe some artists can channel it into outstanding music that they have written themselves, but in this context it at least looks like he was using it to save himself on a tacky reality TV show. Will he pull that little beauty out of the bag again if his back is up against the wall?

It can't be right to put viewers through this process, and it has gone on for far too long. Whenever I have watched this bloody show I have seen it. The personal lives of contestants with some tasteless, syrupy music played in the background while they tell the interviewer how they lost someone they loved. It is a powerful display but is totally abused here. Maybe ITN could experiment with this technique the next time our government wants to invade a third-world country, instead of being their usual uncritical, obsequious, doglike selves. But I suspect it will be limited to drawing us closer to TV contestants and imbuing their every act with a symbolic meaning. A dinner lady or bus driver wants a big break, because in our inverted pyramid of a society the people that do the jobs that really make a difference are rarely seen or heard, much less suitably remunerated for their efforts, while feckless popstars going through the motions are simultaeneously widely lauded and handed the wealth of Croesus. So we get a montage of how hard their life is and what dignity they display in their day-to-day lives, as if that has anything to do with their ability to us their voice to inspire us with a Westlife song. Maybe we want to help an overworked single mother climb out of a rut since society and the government still haven't found the best way to help her make the best of the only life she will ever have. But that still only solves the plight of one individual. And is giving a bereaved wannabe a hand climbing into the mincing machine of C-list celebrity really a compassionate act, seeing as it has obliterated people with far less emotional baggage in the past?

Compare this to The Apprentice, where Alan Sugar generally tells his hard-nosed gaggle of would-be corporate whores that he doesn't want to hear about their personal stories or backgrounds - he just wants some obsequious monkeyboy that can add to his bloated stockpiles of material wealth. Sugar is more or less honest enough to say this. Simon Cowell and Louie Walsh (though admittedly not the other two feather-headed judges, who have been pop singers and so know what spiteful criticism feels like) fancy themselves as reality TV tough guys in the mould of Sugar and Gordon Ramsay, so why don't they just ditch this crap about making someone's dream come true and instead just come out and say it: "we need some clone who can hold a note to sing some cover-versions of cover-versions so we can rake in the cash." And to facilitate this new policy of truth they can issue a blanket ban on revealing anything about their candidates' backgrounds, because all it does is make people who really care feel sorry for them as they are whsiked towards the celebrity scrapheap.

¶ posted by the leech at 10/26/2008

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