Taking the X out of Xfactor

I warned you.

The excellent blues/reggae musician Tim Hain got nowhere with X Factor – probably because he is a musician.

In a funny attempt to divert attention (and sales?) from the nice young man who won the 2010 competition tonight, Tim and his mates have posted the video of Sorry It’s a No. You can buy the download here.

Happy subverting!

 

No, no, no ,no, no, no, no…

A Martian landing in London this week would wonder what he had come to. The most intelligent life in the known universe and we offer a royal engagement and X Factor. Blimey.

I was horrified to see that the announcement of Prince William’s engagement to Kate Middleton set the press free not only to have a bit of a joy-fest (something to fill the pages and the screens for a while – it will now run relentlessly for ever…), but also to do its sneery, bitchy stuff, too. Kate’s appearance and dress sense comes under scrutiny; photos of her in a university fashion show get spread all over the tabloids; Kate’s family get the ‘commoner’ treatment – sneery comments and cartoons about their financial prowess, family business and occasional verbal faux-pas. I hate it.

What gives these people the right to take other people’s lives apart in this way? The uniquely English class system? The desire to see the happy couple go the same way as his parents? Anything goes as long as there are photos, stories, talking points and dramas? I want to rejoice for this happy young couple – but, I feel dread for what they and her family will now be subjected to… all because the nosey public has an insatiable capacity for seeing other people’s lives spread across the kitchen table or the train seat. It is a form of dehumanising voyeurism. I hope William and Kate survive it.

Media people, this isn’t a ‘go’ at you – you’ve got a job to do and this offers rich pickings. But, try to remember their humanity during the feeding frenzy. As for me, I’m not going to watch the television for months…

X Factor is bizarre. It has a terrible attractiveness – as does watching Ann Widdecombe dance. Part of me feels sorry for whoever will win the top prize because the campaign is already running to make sure the Christmas Number One is something else. Last year it was Rage Against the Machine. This year the options are being considered and the Twitterati are active in spreading the word.

I’ve got another suggestion.

I’ve posted on blues musician Tim Hain before. He wondered to me in the pub recently how it was possible for a professional musician playing a Bob Marley classic (at an X Factor audition)to be declined after less than half a minute when some acting dogs got through. Good question, I thought. Anyway, Tim has done a song with some excellent musos - you can download ’Sorry it’s a no’ here. I have no idea how to get this going virally as a potential alternative for the Christmas charts, but it’s worth a go.

Pass it on and say ‘No’ to Cowell’s clones.

 

Germany’s X Factor

It seems that wherever you go in the world now you see the same television programmes, worked according to the same formula. And why not? If it works, repeat it wherever you can get away with it.

Here in Germany I have channel-hopped a bit in order to see what’s going on. I’ve seen some great political coverage, high-quality extended interviews (never deferential, but always respectfully penetrating and usually productive) and some good German football. I have followed the newspapers and seen how Haiti and Afghanistan (in particular) are being covered here. As I keep saying (usually with reference to Helmut Schmidt), you learn a lot about your self and your own culture when you look at it through the eyes and listen to it through the language of another people.

It’s a bit worrying, therefore, that what sticks involuntarily in my mind is Germany’s version of X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent, Pop Idol (they all seem to blend into one vision of tears and self-insightlessness). Here it is called Deutschland sucht den Superstar. The panel is formulaic, too: one young woman who generally looks sympathetic but sad, a bloke who says almost nothing but looks shocked, and the Cowell-esque ‘been there done it’ ageing rock star whose vocabulary seems limited to ‘Scheisse!’ and who looks as if he’s been ‘fanta-ed’.

I’d never heard of Dieter Bohlen before. That’s what is always interesting about seeing something that is familiar in format, but where you have no idea what the credentials of the judges actually are. He’s big in Germany, but he’s brutal to the people who submit themselves to this public humiliation. Bohlen makes Simon Cowell sound diplomatically adept.

I feel like I just don’t ‘get’ it. I know what’s going on, but because I don’t know the characters I can’t relate to them. I have no idea who the other two judges are, but they say almost nothing and defer without demur to Bohlen. I’d love to know what it sounds like through German ears.

But this sort of entertainment is an old formula in new dressing. I was sitting in a cafe in Friedrichshafen this afternoon – my last before returning to England tomorrow – reading Clive James‘s North Face of Soho, the fourth volume of his wonderful Unreliable Memoirs. I didn’t know he had done the pilots for New Faces back in the 1970s. Feeling he would be too critical of the punters, he didn’t go ahead with the job. But he did say this:

I thought the aspirants were touching even when untalented, and if they were talented then they had a better right to hug the screen than the judges.

Clive James knew his limitations. Even if as orange as Simon Cowell, at least Dieter Bohlen has performed on the stage and plied his trade.