Wikipedia pages for former winners of The X Factor are incredible- I never knew there were so many ways of saying someone was dumped by their record label because no-one bought their music. Former X Factor contestants who continue to make music successfully are JLS, Leona Lewis, Alexandra Burke, Olly Murs and of course One Direction, who are having baffling good luck in America. It seems gratuitously cruel to name those who were unable to hold on to their fame. I really want to though. I mean, Shayne Ward.
That is not OK with me. Steve Brookstein, the first winner, is now making a living as a part-time anti-X Factor crusader, part time rape apologist. Joe McElderry’s Wikipedia page is oddly specific, informing us that he made a cameo appearance in a musical version of Dirty Dancing at the Sunderland Empire on Tuesday 25 September. It doesn’t say what year, though, because Joe McElderry’s performance in Dirty Dancing was timeless. Leon Jackson is sad that Cheryl Cole never calls him anymore. Matt Cardle “parted ways” with Simon Cowell’s record label, and is now in partnership with So What Recordings (poor choice). Ray Quinn, who is my age, “continues to perform 1950s Swing Classics around the country”. I can feel myself getting cruel now, I have to stop.
I would imagine that X Factor contestants audition for the show because they want to be big, big stars, not because they want to record one or two albums, not see a lot of the profits and get dropped when people lose interest. But X Factor‘s success rate at producing international stars is, based on twelve people in the live shows per series and four international stars produced over eight series, one in twenty four. One international star per twenty four contestants- we are, of course, counting One Direction as a single person, though in reality they are worth much less than that. Even if you win the series, the odds against you being mentioned in a Kanye West song (like Leona Lewis) or having your own line of novelty condoms (like JLS) are considerable. And say you win X Factor, it doesn’t go great for you and your career is over by the time you’re in your mid-twenties- what then? Touring the country singing swing music at weddings? Is that better than the life you would have had otherwise?
Of course, it’s really easy for me to snark. I do not dream of being a famous singer, I dream of getting someone to pay me to write about Saturday night telly. Even if auditioning for X Factor is demonstrably dicey, and might just wind up making you cry, it makes sense that people do it- in numbers that increase year on year. Provided you are a good enough singer, it is definitely the easiest way in the world of getting millions of people to look at you. Something about the ethos of X Factor ties in unsettlingly with the rhetoric of David Cameron’s government- if you want it hard enough, if you dream big enough, you can have everything you want, so don’t be weak and don’t flounder or you’re finished.
I live in a house where X Factor is watched, so I am aware of it, but I have never really thought about it much. So I decided to give an episode my proper attention. It was quite an experience. I have, of course, followed this type of show before- as a young teenager I definitely watched Popstars, Popstars: The Rivals and Pop Idol, all of which were precursors to X Factor and blueprints for its format. 2002 was a long time ago, though, and I had a few big surprises in store.
Like- terrifying thirty foot screens bearing the judges’ faces.
Women-as-décor.
Dancing women accompanied most songs- without them, the stage would seem vast and the contestant tiny. With them, the whole performance looks cheap and dated. Some of the sets and costumes were surprisingly high-concept, though these often also fall under ‘cheap and dated’- like something a Lady Gaga tribute act would perform on.
This man was given the compliment, “It was just like watching Chris Martin”. He later cried in his dressing room for a full three hours. True story. No not really.
And the dry ice! Oh, the dry ice. I was always under the impression that this type of show was cheap to make, but the set is extremely flash. Some time between when I stopped watching and today they built this terrifying colosseum which dwarfs the contestants, and bought the rights to a lot of Wagner- it’s like they’re trying to make the show interesting through sheer force of will. I also found myself wondering how much they had to pay Dermot O’Leary to do such a tedious job, year after year.
It looked to me like a show that was trying too hard, and not just with the visuals. X Factor is conceptually extremely simple: it is a talent competition, in which twelve singers compete to win a record deal. It gives itself substance through wringing personal, emotional drama out of the contestants, and thereby eliciting emotional investment from the viewer. In this sense, the show is very callous: your panic attacks, swollen vocal cords, dead grandmother or abusive father animate the show and give people something to hold on to, as do your age, your appearance, what kind of week you’ve had and how you are taking to fame- that’s what the little montages they play before performances are for. This week, one contestant was having problems with her vocal cords so she went to a doctor and was filmed having an endoscopy- these are her frickin’ tonsils:
If they just wanted a good singer, they could do it in a week. They want a good singer whom the public already know and care for and whose Christmas single they will buy, and they want to fill their schedules; that takes sixteen weeks, and a look inside them, figuratively or literally.
As for the people on the show- I like Tulisa a lot. I have been a fan for a while, since her extremely dignified and right-on reaction to her ex-boyfriend leaking a sex tape of her- she released a video saying that she had done nothing wrong, and it was the man who should be ashamed of himself for betraying her trust. She seems to be pretty invested in the people she meets on the show, she says what she thinks and she doesn’t do the showy, misleading stuff the others do for the camera- you know, “It’s not good news for you today I’m afraid…IT’S GREAT NEWS!!!”, that kind of thing. The Pussycat Dolls’ Nicole Scherzinger is the queen of that kind of thing, and also of barmy outfits and sweet overfamiliarity with contestants. She is very likeable. Gary and Louis are…fine. The judges are there to comment on the contestant’s performance; if they say anything negative, the whole audience boos loudly, which makes giving genuine feedback pretty tricky.
Unfortunately, none of the contestants really grabbed me. There are two acts who you’d describe as not ‘typical’ for the show, in the sense that they play acoustic guitars and have slightly mannered regional accents: Lucy Spraggan, who would like to sound like Billy Bragg and took the unnecessary step of writing her own lyrics to a Florence and the Machine song; and James Arthur, who has LIFE tattooed on his knuckles. Maybe it’s good to have a diversity of styles of music on the show, but I can’t help thinking- if they do win, they probably won’t like what they have to do afterwards. There is one guy, Rylan Clark, who is bad at singing and is hanging on in there due to the British public’s well-documented good will towards people who aren’t that good at what they do. There are three groups, including two incredibly dispiriting One Direction-style teen boybands who as far as I can tell were thrown together during the audition process. They perform like the members have never met, or like they did meet once and something awful happened, and they now share a terrible, shameful secret. Everyone’s favourite, according to my sister, is Ella Henderson- she is 16, she is a great singer, but the square in my head wants her to stay in school and try again when she is a bit older.
Around when I was thinking, “Ooh that nice young girl should stay in school!”, I knew the show was not for me. I just did not feel at all excited, by any of it. The most exciting thing on screen was Nicole Scherzinger’s weird hair. It’s a trueism now that X Factor isn’t about music, it’s about TV. I don’t know what I think about that. To listen to any of the limp first singles by any of the winners, which are usually called something like “My Climb To The Top of the Mountain of Success Was Only Possible Because Your Love Makes Me Fly” and sound like they are written by committees of ITV researchers, you’d think X Factor was devised by TV executives who hated not only music but also people. Thing is, if the music is uninspiring, as TV it is fundamentally boring, and relies totally on the viewer starting to root for someone, or loving the music, the bright lights and the tension. And it is surely clear by now that I am too grumpy for any of that. I hate the dancing women. I think Louis Walsh is irrelevant- since when was managing Westlife a positive in someone’s employment history? I worry that the contestants will regret X Factor, that it will do bad things for them. I think the whole process must be really stressful and scary. And another pop culture phenomenon evades me forever.
