I was only just recovering from the news that Rita Ora and Cheryl Whatever-her-name-is-this-week had left the X Factor when Piers Morgan put his name forward as a new judge. “What on earth qualifies you to be a judge on a talent show?” asked the radio interviewer, although not quite as bluntly as that. “I discovered Susan Boyle”, replied Morgan. Oh, that’s all right, then.
My loyal reader will know that the X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent are inessential to my viewing list. I tired of talent shows a near lifetime ago at around the time Hughie Green hosted Opportunity Knocks. (Ask your dad, kids.) It is not a new genre but it has become enormously popular.
We know that the X Factor is little more than a TV karaoke show with judges and it exists for people who want to be famous, or in the case of some of the judges, to stay famous. From my very limited understanding, the judges are less talented than the performers.
I do not know a great deal about Cheryl, other than she was once in the plastic pop band Girls Aloud. She was one of the three girls who couldn’t sing at all. Luckily, Cheryl is very pretty which makes up for her lack of talent, so she was chosen to judge the talent of other karaoke singers. Ms Ora is a singer too, although I could not name a single song she has performed. And Radio One breakfast show presenter Nick Grimshaw, who makes a living out of playing other people’s music was called up too, but they’re all gone now.
The talent shows of today are tightly controlled by Simon Cowell, a wonderfully camp man, with suspiciously dark hair and and an even more suspiciously smooth face. He is the “genius” behind it all and genius he must be because he persuades 10 million people a week to stay in and watch amateurs singing other people’s songs. Now why would anyone want to do that?
My newspaper tells me that since Ms Ora and Miss Cheryl have left the show, Cowell is looking for replacements to freshen the show up. So how about Sharon Osbourne, a woman famous for being married to the lead singer of Black Sabbath? And people are thrilled she is coming back.
Really, it’s all about the judges and the cruelty. No one really wants to see someone who is good at karaoke, we all want to see someone who is crap, who can’t keep time or hit a note. And then we want to see Cowell rip into them. Am I right?
I could not think of anything worse to watch, apart from, perhaps, any show involving Jim Davidson, but 10 million people can’t all be wrong, can they?
