Whatever your attitude to X Factor and other ‘talent’ shows of its ilk (and i use the word talent here loosely) there’s simply no tiptoeing round the following: they’re kind of a big deal. Saturday night’s television landscape has become positively colonised by the X Factor. From 8pm, the live show demands your attention on both TV3 and ITV. This is immediately followed by the Xtra Factor, which acts as a compendium of interviews and backstage footage that simply wasn’t good enough to make it into the actual show, but nonetheless satisfies viewer withdrawal symptoms for those who want even more cutting remarks from Simon or lingering shots of Cheryl Cole’s designer ensemble.
X Factor, now in its 6th series, is as popular as it ever has been. The ‘Big Bands’ night on Saturday the 24th October attracted a total of 13.4 million viewers. This means that X Factor laid claim to almost half the available audience – 48%. And that’s not including viewers from Ireland and other countries around the world. On Sunday night, as Danyl Johnson and Miss Frank battled to stay in the show, ITV said the five minutes between 8.50pm and 8.55pm equalled the previous week’s peak of 14.8, 51% of the total viewership. Figures such as these are the subject of TV Exec’s wet dreams. X Factor, and talent shows like them, are a cultural phenomenon.
The genesis of this television format came about on Tuesday 13 February 2001. TV veteran Alan Boyd, and then head of Thames TV, had a meeting in his London offices with two men he had never met before: Simon Cowell and Simon Fuller. The pitch that followed would ultimately change mainstream entertainment not just in Britain and Ireland, but around the world. The three men sketched out a rough idea for ‘Your Idol’, the working title for the show that was to become Pop Idol.
Boyd recently released the slip of paper on which he scibbled the notes from the meeting. “Gone With the Wind” is scrawled in the upper corner, indicating that the execs wanted the show to have the lavish, grandiose production values of epic movies of Hollywood’s golden era. “Sun in” is written on another side – they knew that if the show was to work it would have to foster an almost incestuous relationship with the tabloid press. Of course, a mutually beneficial love affair began.
Airing that Autumn, Pop Idol was a mammoth success attracting mass familiy audiences, producing guaranteed number 1 chart hits and spawning spin-off shows such as The X Factor, American Idol and Britain’s Got Talent. As well as this, the Pop Idol template acted as inspiration for a whole host of talent shows that appeared on tv listings in the following years, all concentrating on the key elements of a judging panel and a public voting system: Strictly Come Dancing, Dancing on Ice, So you think you can dance? Pop Idol still runs in a staggering 44 countires around the world, while American Idol, the American take on the show, sells to 150. The X Factor sells in countries as far apart as Austrailia, Finland, Morocco and Kazakhstan. Meanwhile, the ‘Got Talent’ formula can be found on tv sets in 25 different countries. At this rate, tv talent shows could be classified as a global obsession.
Of course, the reason the formula so easily transcends cultural and language barriers is that it is the televisual equivilant of bread and butter – bland, generic and as dull as a Brian Cowen speech on well, anything. Every version, in any language, has the ‘tottie’ judge, the sarcastic industry expert and the ‘nicer’ judge who doles out advice to the gormless contestants wheeled out for our entertainment. Among the contestants themselves, it would be fair to say that few, if any, of the contestants are blessed with an ‘X’ factor. Sure, not everyone has an innate ability to sing, dance and look relatively attractive in spandex. However, how often are you left stunned in your armchair because of the raw talent that transcends through the tv screen into your living room? Not very often, I’d wager.
While this sounds suspiciously as if I am appalled by the idea of a talentless talent show, the opposite is in fact the case. I realise that X Factor is artless, inauthentic and largely useful solely as a vehicle to make its judges bigger stars than they already are. But at the same time, I can’t help reveling in the glorious mundanaity of it all. The show is almost all surface and no depth. This year’s series, for example, has given us the magnificent spectacle of Cheryl Cole, the patron saint of hair care products and cheated wives everywhere, wrinkling her nose at Simon’s most chauvanistic remarks and beaming in the reflected glory of a fanbase that worships every perfectly coiffed hair on her head.
The contestants themselves are the usual parade of down-on-their-luck misfits, desperate to “follow their dreams” and be as big as Mariah/Beyonce/Robbie. The one exception are Louis Walsh’s proteges, John and Edward. In case you’ve missed them, John and Edward (or ‘Jedward’ as hard-core fans are calling them) are twin brothers from Lucan who literally can’t sing but are stubbornly refusing to let that keep them from world domination. They are the most deliciously tacky and refreshing act on television this year, prancing across our screens in matching outfits every Saturday night and are quickly becoming the only reason I’m tuning in at all. Clearly I’m not the only one who feels this way.
Despite suspect singing abilities, the twins have been voted through yet again and have reached week five in the competition. Simon hates them of course. In week two, when the boys donned matching red PVC suits for their rendition of Britney Spears’ ‘Oops…I did it again’, he quipped that he would hate to think what would happen if they won. The implication behind his comment, of course, was that X Factor acted as some sort of standard-maker in establishing great British talent. The truth is that the judges are the real stars of the show, and figures like Simon Cowell stand to benefit the most from the winning acts (the winner is awarded a contract with Syco or Simco Ltd, Simon Cowell’s company).
John and Edward’s obvious lack of talent shows X Factor up for what it really is: a procession of generic eye-candy that ritualistically brutalises decent songs written by estabished acts (who could forget Alexandra Burke’s version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah?). John and Edward take it to the next, inevitable, terrifying level. They can’t sing. And that’s the point.
