The X-Factor: Week Two

Welcome to the most boring episode of the X-Factor ever! “LAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAST WEEK!”, excited voiceover man (who I fucking love) bellows, before recapping all the stuff that you know happened because you were paying attention to your friends Facebook status updates. Dermhot tells us that our Saturday night starts right here, unless you’re watching it on TV3’s iPlayer, in which case your Saturday night starts on Monday evening.

The theme for this week is “Musical Heroes”, which is about as loose and vague as the themes tend to be at this early stage when they haven’t quite decided what to shoehorn each of the contestants as. Dermhot expects us to believe that the singers will be covering songs by their personal musical heroes. And if you believe that, then I urge you to never open an email purporting to be from a Nigerian prince.

On with the show! First up in this two and a half hour advert-fest, we have Storm Lee, performing Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run. Upon hearing Storm’s song choice, alarm-bells immediately began to ring for me. This is a man already struggling with credibility (which is saying a lot on this show), and he’s going to sing a song that was lampooned, along with the entire concept of the reality TV show singing contest, by Peter Kay in spectacular fashion in Britain’s Got the Pop Factor not so long ago. “But”, I think to myself, “The X-Factor producers are canny individuals, coming as they do from the most devious, Machiavellian circle of Hell. Surely they would never be as stupid as to have Storm’s performance of this song revolve around him straddling a motorbike and rocking out?” Imagine my complete lack of surprise when Storm appears on-stage to perform something not unlike the first minute of this clip

The performance, already hindered by being nowhere near as epic as Geraldine’s memorable act (there’s no segue into Free Nelson Mandela, for one thing), is further hindered by being very karaoke. It is all a bit flat and uninspired and the smell of desperation wafting off of Storm is potent enough to be bottled and sold as Jordan’s next fragrance. Judges! Simon makes the very accurate point that Storm doesn’t so much come off as a rock-star as Louis Walsh’s vision of what a rock star is, which is probably the most succinct and apt summary of Storm Lee we’re going to get.

Massive Arse, and the large the growth attached to it, which I think we’ve decided to call “Treyc Cohen”, is next. Massive Arse is singing Purple Rain, which means that anyone other than the official X Factor UK channel on YouTube attempting to upload this performance will find themselves immediately sued by Prince Squiggle for 500,000 euros. Probably. It’s a good enough performance, if a little too glory-notey/shouty (I get the impression I’m going to be making this complaint about Arse Cohen fairly often...) but she’s no Ruth Lorenzo, dammit. Dannii Minogue calls Treyc petite. Clearly she’s never had to walk behind Treyc then. Simon loved it, of course. He concedes she lost the melody in parts but WHO CARES WHEN SHE CAN VOCALLY EXPLODE ON THOSE BIG NOTES, WOO!

Next up, we have Big Gay Paije. The Inevitable Attempt To Create Drama in Paije’s intro video is that he was sometimes out of breath in rehearsals. Because, they basically conclude in a much gentler manner- he’s a big fattie. Vocal Coach Evie Burnett’s solution is to plop Paije onto a treadmill to “increase his lung capacity”. Bless. Paije will be performing Alicia Key’s If I Ain’t Got You, clearly a very energetic song that requires lots of stamina and jumping around, like all of Alicia’s hi-octane, thumping hits. There are a couple of parts where it sounds like Paije has phlegm in his throat as he tries to glory note. Oh Cowell, you have so much to answer for with your big-note bias. Judges! Liked it. Mostly. Cowell has a rant about Friedman’s staging not being up to par or something, and it is at this point that I realise that most of Friedman’s choreography is actually meant to be good. Really? I thought it was meant to be terrible all the time, in a post-modern ironic way. Dannii tells Cowell that she thought the choreography was great and the audience erupt with applause. Because they’re fucking dance critics now.

Ah bollocks, the Bieber Squad. Can I not skip this part? I have decided they are my nemeses for this series. This is unfortunate as they’re probably going to make it all the way to the final. The Inevitable Attempt To Create Drama is to show us Curly Bieber getting a bit of a hurty tummy while rehearsing. Oh no! It’s stage fright! Will he get stage fright during the live performance? Let’s hope not! DRAMA DRAMA DRAMA CURLY-HEADED DRAMA! The boys come out to perform.... My Life Would Suck Without You... by their musical hero Kelly Clarkson? I see. Should their musical heroes not be JLS for reintroducing the concept of the boyband to an unsuspecting world? As I watch them sing, I am LITERALLY paralysed by not caring about whether or not Curly Bieber will vomit shit out his mouth from his stage-fright. Another reason I hate the Biebers: they do an awful lot of exuberant face-pulling to show how happy and loving it they are that’s about as genuine as Storm Lee’s rock-star credentials. The Irish one with the two-tone hair is particularly bad for it. Fuck off you little shits! The song is awful – I’ve rewatched it once or twice for scientific purposes, and it seems like the music is deliberately drowning out everyone bar Birth Mark On His Neck Bieber to mask the fact that they’re not particularly in tune. The performance ends and we’re treated to another round of arms-around-one-another fake chumminess from the boys. Judges! Louis points out that Kelly Clarkson is hardly their musical hero, an accusation that goes without answer.

Cher Lloyd is next. Doing Jay-Z’s Hard Knock Life. Funny thing happens during this – they amp the music up during the singing bits, as they’re clearly scared that Cher can’t do anything outside her rap niche (Cher being one of the contestants who the producers definitely have shoehorned, and woe be upon her if she tries to escape) but from what I could hear she honestly didn’t seem that bad at the non-rap bits. Then again, it IS hard to tell when you have the backing vocals and music cranked up to 11. Judges! Dannii didn’t like it. Everyone else did. No one cares what Dannii thinks. Simon declares that he “sees the future” and artists like Cher are the future. Cowell’s clairvoyance must be a skill he only developed recently, given that he wasn’t able to avert Leon Jackson’s album flopping or prevent Gay Joe from winning over Easily Marketable Cheeky Chappy Chosen One Olly last year.

Mr Cellophane is next, performing something obscure I can’t be arsed looking up, because I don’t feel like expending the effort on someone who is going to be out within the next 3 weeks. Performance is good enough, in an OH MY GOD I FEEL THE EMOTION IN HIS VOICE, WHO IS HE AGAIN? sort of way. Judges! All loved it. Yawn.

Next stop on the boredom express; Diva Fever! Singing... Barbra Streisand? This is, without a doubt, the worst song choice in the history of the show. I know we’re not meant to take Diva Fever seriously, but honestly Cowell, surely you could have extended your thought process a little deeper than “Hmm... they’re gay! The song is called Barbra Streisand! PERFECT!” Mistake number 2 is letting the Diva who can’t sing take most of the... well, to say vocals is a stretch. Let’s just say he takes most of the wailing and monicker-calling and even that much is pushing his abilities a wee bit. The choreography is also the gayest thing to ever happen on the X-Factor stage, which considering that Louis Walsh, Joe McElderry and Brian Friedman have all stood there, is saying something. Judges! There’s another bit, just like last week, where Louis tries to make a joke that falls completely flat and there’s an awkward silence. I hope this is a weekly occurrence. Maybe we’ll get a prize if we can remember which acts Louis’ lead balloons follow.

This show is painfully boring this week. I demand more spectacle and more ridiculousness from now on. And I want them adhere to the theme strictly, locking the contestants into doing something they don’t want to do. I want to see Katie Waissell come on stage dressed as a drum for a performance of My Chemical Romance’s Black Parade during Rock Week, watch the Biebers soar to new lyrical heights on Suicide is Painless for TV Theme Tunes week and see Mary Byrne become a hot mess to cover Take it Off for Kesha week.

Rebecca Ferguson! Singing Feeling Good. Her drama this week is that she can’t stick her tits out to seem sexy enough for her performance (which is ironic considering she has two kids at 20 but I guess there’s a difference between being sexy and being easy), or something. I dunno, I wasn’t paying attention because I was so fucking bored. She’s alright but a bit reserved. There’s something hard to put your finger on that stops it being a memorable performance; maybe it is actually a confidence thing like the judges keep saying. But then again that would mean they’re right about something and I refuse to countenance that.

Aiden Grimshaw and his Broad Shoulders, Dreamy Eyes and Serial Killer Facial Expressions are up next, singing John Lennon’s Jealous Guy. It’s kinda painful. He’s all over the place and his facial expressions aren’t so much I Am Going To Eat Your Brain With Fava Beans this week as I Am Puppy Who Has Been Kicked Please Hug Me, as he realises it’s going disastrously wrong. Dannii’s face as Aiden grinds to a squawking conclusion says it all. She looks something like this:

Other judges! For some reason, Louis loved it. I think I have some competition in the Aiden-crush stakes. Hiss. Cheryl and Simon are aware of how shit it was and say as much. Simon puts it down to nerves, which means we’re definitely getting an I-Have-To-Overcome-My-Nerves/I-Need-To-Prove-Myself-This-Week intro video for Aiden next week, then.

As if I wasn’t excited enough after getting Aiden in a suit, next up we have Wagner. Wagner’s intro video is an origin story – it explains how Wagner always loved to sing, but he was drawn to KARATE, because, as he puts it “I wanted to be an awesome fighter” (this is backed up with a picture of Karate Action Wagner roundhouse kicking Chuck Norris into orbit). Then, apropos of nothing, we are shown a picture of a topless Wagner holding a lion by the tail. I think the lion might represent the sheer unstoppable masculinity of Wagner. “I think I wasted my life without singing, and so I decided to sing.” Wagner informs us, with a saucy wink. You could substitute “singing” for just about any other activity and I bet Wagner would excel at it. Oh lord. I love the way overexcited voiceover man says VAAAAAGNER! I want it as my text message noise.

Nothing can describe this scene in all its glory, but I’ll try: Wagner. In a dinner jacket. With no shirt. Just rippling Wagner chest. Singing Tom Jones’s Help Yourself. Needless to say, there are a bevy of Wagnettes on stage cavorting flirtatiously with The Majestic One. They’re not acting. They’ve just fallen under his spell. A bunch of male Wagnettes appear on-stage to let us know that Wagner has enough lovin’ for both genders. It makes sense really. It would be a crime for Wagner to deprive anyone of the opportunity to sleep with him. The performance drives the dancers into such a hedonistic frenzy that at the end the men are groping the women’s boobies outrageously. Judges! Embrace the madness that is Wagner. “Are you getting it on with Mary?” Cowell asks, ignorant of the fact that Wagner could never give his heart to just one woman.

Ah! Sly X-Factor producers! Knowing that the audience will be so worked up into a euphoric daze following Wagner’s performance, they put Katie Waissel on next, so that we associate her with the release of the endorphins from the post-Wagner orgasm. You can’t fool me! The intro video tells us that Katie used to perform to Care Bears in her bedroom. I refuse to believe that. Were bears, maybe. But I cannot believe that the Empress of Evil ever owned Care Bears. Unless she scratched the symbols off their stomachs and replaced it with things like the Biohazard symbol, or a swastika. Hell, I have trouble believing Katie was ever a child. I think she just tumbled out of her mother fully formed following some Faustian pact, and immediately set about trying to become famous to fill the void where her soul should be. Katie is performing some Etta James song. She’s fairly good, but don’t let that fool you. She’d destroy you and send your loved ones to Hell in an instant if she thought it would get her a positive headline. Judges! Louis and Dannii both take credit for saving her. Don’t remind me, you two.

Oh vomit. It’s Belle Amie. They’re singing You Really Got Me by their musical heroes, The Kinks. *cough* It isn’t as awful as last week, but it’s still pretty awful. And they’re still really out of tune. If only they had penises and Bieber fringes and were called One Direction, then none of that would matter! I can’t pay attention to the performance, because I’m distracted by the backing dancer pretending to play the guitar and doing an utterly unconvincing job of it. But I’m going to take a wild guess and say that their performance consisted mostly of strutting about trying to look sassy while batting heavily made up eyelids at the camera.

Mary Byrne from Tesco, Ireland, is next. “Junno when yehr on a rollercoaster, and yehr nervous ? And yeh come to the end and yeh go “OH MY GOD THAT WAS BRILLIANT! And yeh get off and yehr shakin’? Magnify dat 60,000 times! Cos that’s the feeling yeh get.” It’s impossible to know for sure whether Mary is talking about the reaction she got last week, or what it feels like to fuck Wagner. Mary is singing You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me. As with last week, it’s pretty flawless, but maybe I’m blinded by my patriotism for Tesco. She gets another rapturous applause that goes on forever, and the producers are probably pissed off because if that continues every week they might have to drop one of the 78 ad breaks.

Matt Cardle’s hat is in the washing machine this week, as he performs Just the Way You Are. So, after an intro video that tells us that Matt likes Nirvana, we’re supposed to believe that his musical hero is... Bruno Mars. Who released his debut single this year. Mkah, X-Factor. I totally buy it. We attempt to wring some drama out of the fact that he’s going to chance a note that only Mariah Carey and Kurt from Glee are capable of hitting but we all know he’s going to do it because they wouldn’t have put him on in the coveted last performance slot if he hadn’t already done it fifty times in rehearsal. Anyway, he’s pretty good, aside from one or two shaky bits and I’m sure he melted a few hearts in the process (and shattered a few windows) and further cemented his place as favourite.

Results Show!

I really appreciate that they’ve stopped doing that ridiculous thing they did last year where they’d make the contestants wear the same clothes they were wearing during the previous night’s show. I’m sure it would’ve been difficult for Katie Waissel to perform that ballad in her sing-off last week if she’d still been wearing that virtual reality headset from the future.

Oh fuck, the group performance. Since they introduced the concept of the Group Performance last year, there has never actually been a good one. Tonight, performing Telephone... that doesn’t change. Everyone does that thing where they hold the microphone diagonally upwards to obscure their mouths so you can’t tell they’re all miming the group song. It doesn’t help already shaky illusion when John Adeleye takes the microphone away and stops moving his lips while somehow managing to bellow “Cos I’ll be dancing!” We also know that it’s been autotuned to fuck because Belle Amie are completely in tune.

Moving swiftly onwards, we get performances from Diana Vickers (meh) and Katie Perry (meh) before the results (yay!): Storm Lee is unceremoniously ejected. He reminds us all to follow our dreams so that someday we can be 40-something wannabes kicked out of talent shows in the second week. This leaves Belle Amie and Diva Fever as our bottom two. Wow, this is going to be nail bitingly unpredictable. Diva Fever perform I Will Survive, showing that they understand irony at least. Belle Amie perform Big Girls Don’t Cry, by Herpie... sorry, Fergie. They’re better than normal, which is to say that they’re almost in tune. Big surprise, the judges save Belle Amie. I predict that they’ll either go next week, or avoid the bottom placing completely next week, and then go the following week. Or they’ll murder one another fighting over who gets to sing lead vocals. Whichever way it goes, the viewers win!