He may well be giving it his thumbs down. If he was anywhere near as important as he thinks he is, this may have been the signal for an execution. Based on the performance so far this year, The X Factor is overdue for the chop. Last year’s winner Leona Lewis may be riding high in the charts, and 2005′s winner Shayne Ward has just released his latest album which has some reasonable material on it even though it doesn’t exactly leave me breathless (see what I did there?), but out of 200,000 auditionees for the 2007 show there is no-one that even comes close to either of these two for vocal talent, stage presence, or that elusive X factor.
So what’s gone wrong? Has its time passed? Are we the audience jaded or is there really no more talent left to unearth? Has the fourth judge spoiled the party, or is it just another case of reality fatigue?
Every reader of this piece will have their own opinion on this, and I’d love to read them all. For me, the main problem with this year’s X Factor is simple: there’s not enough talent.
Why this has been a problem this year, when we’ve had so many good performers and memorable characters in previous years (Chico, Rowetta, Tabby, Andy), is a mystery. American Idol doesn’t have the same problem. If anything, their talent pool seems to grow year on year. This year in particular, the AI finals were packed with good singers who performed well, along with a handful of real stand-outs.
Over on this side of the pond, we appear to have sucked the well dry. It’s not just that Leona is a hard act to follow, although this is certainly true. Even the most successful reality show winner of all time – the original Pop Idol Will Young – pales when compared with Leona.
So where has all the talent gone? If you believe the conspiracy theorists (and enough insiders have gone into print now to make this at least a consistent story), then the answer must be that talent scouts looking for singers to “fast-track” through to boot camp and beyond have failed to come up with the goods. Scouring the pubs and clubs (which is where, for instance, Same Difference were performing before being “discovered” by X Factor) has resulted in a relatively small number of relatively small-time talents, compared with previous years.
All the gimmickry that surrounds X Factor – the pretend rows, the blanket press coverage, the extra judge, the sackings and reinstatings, the flouncing and the posturing – we could forgive it all if there was just some plain, simple, straightforward good singing to look forward to every week. From more than just the obvious contenders: Rhydian, Niki and, just barely, Leon.
But as it is, all we have to look forward to is some tone-deaf screeching followed by a series of sycophantic slobbering from a judging panel that looks increasingly out of touch with reality. Week after week we see the audience stand and applaud halfway through a song as if the singer has hit triple-high C or pulled off some amazing ad-libbing when in fact all they’ve managed to do is get the right note. Often for the first time in the number. We hear lavish, over-the-top praise from the judges after crushingly mediocre performances and, frankly, it gets boring.
Mr Cowell has stated that he’ll be done with X Factor after seven seasons. If he and his fellow producers don’t pull their collective finger out and make a better job of it next time round, I think 5 will be the magic number.
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