IT’S TIME! TO FACE! THE OLD CLIPS? Initially, I feared that
the fact we were being treated to a bunch of random audition clips for the
first 15 minutes of the show meant that Kitty Brucknell went on a pre-emptive
rampage due to the likelihood of being eliminated tomorrow and had killed all the
judges. Then I realised we would never be so lucky. And we weren’t, as it turns
out the whole shebang was merely delayed because of a power failure. An unusual example of fail occuring outside the confines of the show for once.
The delayed show begins with another Dermot dance routine. I
really don’t know what to make of these, but I guess they’re here to stay so I
should just grin and bear it. It’s like a less awful version of the Horrendous
Group Song™. Perhaps it’s Dermot’s pitch for a place on Strictly Come Dancing
in case he ever gets the boot from presenting this. Anyway, he apologises for
the late start, and introduces a short video to bring viewers up to speed with the
latest farcical developments in this chaotic series. Frankie “decided to leave”
which is code for “Frankie snorted 18 lines of Cocaine and had an epiphany
wherein he realised he was an absolute bollocks with no talent and needed to go”.
Desperate to ensure the show remains on schedule, because they’ve already put a
significant deposit down for the final at Wembley Arena (and that place doesn’t
come cheap), the producers had to scramble for a replacement contestant to pad
the drama out for the requisite number of weeks. So they decided to
bring back the four contestants eliminated in Week one. They’ve extracted dour Solja
Boy Jonjo Kerr from the frontlines of the Cylon Civil War, where he valiantly
holds the line against the Franco-Klingon hordes. They travelled to Planet
Boring, ignoring the pleas of a desperate Sophie Habibis in favour of James “I’m
so dull I don’t even have a proper surname” Michael. Then they made their way
to Essex and found amazeballs half-preggers totes emosh duo Two Shoes
underneath a pile of coats they’d stolen from a nightclub. Finally, they
rescued the oldest-looking sixteen year-old in the universe, Kat Slater
look-alike Amelia Lily from the clutches of Phil Mitchell. The
video explaining this nonsense actually features Two Shoes saying “OMG SHOE
REVENGE” which is possibly my favourite moment of the entire series. The most
popular of these four will be chosen by public vote to return to the
competition and perform at the end of tonight’s show and then face potential
elimination tomorrow. Got it? No? Well, that’s okay, because it’s a foregone
conclusion that Amelia Lily is going to romp home with the vote anyway.
Dermot introduces the judges and tonight’s theme, which is
Sing a Song by Lady Gaga or Queen. For some reason, Kelly Rowland has decided
to dress as a penguin tonight, demonstrating that her tenuous grip on reality
is worsening each week. Dermot asks each of the judges which of the four acts
they’d like to see return. Tulisa, Kelly and Gary unsurprisingly go for each of
the acts they originally mentored. Louis, meanwhile, picks Kat Slater.
Somewhere backstage Jonjo Kerr has shed a single tear. Maybe. If he wasn’t a
dead-eyed sociopath who joined the army to feed his urge to kill.
First to perform is Kitty Brucknell, which means she’s going home tomorrow, alas. Kitty’s VT focuses on how she’s the biggest Lady Gaga fan in the world and absolutely cannot wait for the opportunity to perform Born this Way. Her excitement at becoming Gaga is palpable. She bounces up and down and off the walls, detailing her elaborate plans for Born This Way. Then it turns out that Misha B will be performing it instead because she knows where Kitty’s dad lives (in a shopping centre, wearing a sandwich board that says “Vote Kitty”, if this intro video is anything to go by) and has lots of friends with crowbars. Bereft at being denied the opportunity to sing her favouritest Gaga song ever, Kitty had a massive strop and decided that if she couldn’t sing it then she wasn’t going to sing any Gaga song at all, and she was going to hold her breath until she fainted and not do her homework and Misha B is a big meanie. So, Kitty has decided to sing Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now instead. From atop a chariot. Attached to four dancers dressed as... leather-clad war horses? I think the sheer lunacy of the staging for this performance actually broke my brain’s ability to interpret it. The dancers rear. They shake their heads in a horse-stylee. They approximate a canter. The level of sheer insanity on display is almost equal to the Mad Hatter’s party performance of It’s Oh So Quiet from a few weeks ago. I think they did it on purpose to bleach away all memory of Frankie. Unfortunately, the routine isn’t enough to ignore the fact that it’s a fairly weak vocal. JUDGES! Gary calls Kitty “very pretty” which is probably the closest he’s come to being aroused in about 12 years.
Is your brain still reeling from the sight of grown adults
pretending to gallop about on stage as horses while a botoxed “twenty-eight”
year old channelled Boadicea? Do you need the equivalent of a nice cup of tea
and a sit down following a frenetic epileptic seizure brought on by a diamond bullet
of sheer madness being shot into your cerebral cortex from a sniper-rifle carved
from pure calcified bedlam? You’re in luck, because Craig Colton is up next!
Craig’s VT is all about how hard he works and features practice and singing
lessons with Gary Barlow. Does the fact that Gary was doing a lot of singing in
the video make him eligible for the sing off in the next show? Here’s hoping!
Craig enjoyed himself last week, when he proved he could do up-tempo by singing
the ballad version of a floor filler. Therefore, he has decided to take a
chance and be even more unique this week. You won’t be at all surprised then to
hear that Craig’s unique spin on Lady Gaga’s Paparazzi is to completely rip off
her piano-version of the song. And without Gaga manically tinkling the ivories
it isn’t half as fun. Oh, maybe by “unique” he was referring to the fact that
confirmed homosexualist Craig Colton has changed the lyrics from a male object
of desire to female. A combination of his newfound sexual confusion and
disturbingly tight trousers make this the scariest Biscuitman performance ever.
I genuinely thought his considerable and quite-confined thighs were just going
to explode and kill the audience. Considering the rapturous applause they give
Big Bore Biscuitman, however, perhaps death is the least of what they deserve.
JUDGES! Kelly Rowland informs Craig that “You just did that” and I wonder if she’s
trying to steal Louis Walsh’s world title for stating the obvious. She’ll have
her work cut out.
Tulisa introduces her only remaining act, Little Kandy
Girl-Lash. They’re her “Little Muffins”, apparently. Though one of them is much
higher in calories than all the others. The intro video is a bit all over the
place. First of all it’s about the girls being sad that The Risk went. Then
they’re happy because they’re the most successful girl band on the X-Factor
ever, which must mean they’re going to be in the bottom two tomorrow with
Kitty. Then they have a not-at-all-staged “girly night in” with Tulisa. Then
several massive random dogs magically appear. Then they’re rehearsing and Pick ‘n
Mix breaks down and everyone is sad and I have no idea what was going on.
EDITORS? NARRATIVE STRUCTURE? SORT IT OUT! Anyway, Little Kandy Girl-Lash will
be performing Gaga’s Telephone tonight. Myxomatosis takes most of the vocals
actually, with the rest just backing her up. Also: Pick ‘n’ Mix is wearing her
gigantic chunky neckwear that spells out LOVE yet again. Except it’s on
backwards. I hope the poor girl isn’t dyslexic on top of all her other flaws. JUDGES!
Gary Barlow spits into their faces and tells them they’re getting predictable
and he’s sick of seeing them have fun and wishes they were miserable cunts like
Janet instead. He asks if they’re happy
doing the same thing every week and they have a hilarious Little Mix huddle
wherein they confer and decide that they are indeed happy doing the same thing
every week. It’s almost endearing.
Wee Janet Devlin from Ireland is next. We know this because
Kelly Rowland introduces Janet by mentioning Ireland, talks about Ireland
several times in the intro-video, and mentions Ireland again after the song is
finished. From this, I conclude that Kelly has only just learned what Ireland
is in the past few days, and wants to show off the new word she learned. Please
note that Kelly Rowland is wearing what appear to be several foxes, a bear
pelt, eighteen mink and a couple of raccoons about her shoulders. Janet is sad
in her video because she was third from bottom last week. No Janet, it is in no
particular order, remember? Also, the bottom three were The Risk, Johnny and
Kitty, you thicko. The theme of Janet’s VT is Let’s Get Janet Back In Her Box. To
achieve this goal, she’ll be performing Queen’s Somebody to Love in an
overwrought, wrist-slittingly depressing style. Seriously, it’s so scaled back
and slowed down that listening to it practically propels me back in time to a
period when Frankie was still in the competition, so I’m forced to fast forward
for my own well-being. It’s just so, so dull. Surprise elimination tomorrow?
Maybe. Then again, look how far the Norrie Iron vote got Eoghan Quigg a few
years back... *shudder* JUDGES! Louis Walsh is incredibly enthusiastic about
Janet but we won’t pay any attention to that because it’s all lies. Tulisa says
that she feels that Janet is very one dimensional. This is the same Tulisa who
last week chastened Janet for trying something different and told her to get
back into her box and don’t dare come out. Dermot rightly points this out. The
judges ignore this sage fact. Dermot basically asks Janet how she feels about
being pigeon-holed and she says she just needs to find a middle ground between
sad and happy. Sappy! No Janet! Come out and sing Du Hast next week! You know
you want to.
From Janet feeling uncomfortable in her box, to sparkly gay Marcus
finally finding his. His VT is concerned with how much fun he had last week and
how that’s the kind of music he wants to be making. To this end, he comes out
and performs Another One Bites the Dust with the exact same dance routine and
in the exact same style as Reet Petite last week. It just does not work. This
song, in this style is just completely jarring and wrong. And just when it
seems like it can’t get any worse, the performance ends with Marcus and his
dancers blowing sparkle fag glitter dust into the camera. The judges uniformly
decree that doing something identical to last week was the wrong move. “Tactical
Critique”, cries Barlow, which assumes that the judges on this show have about
100 more IQ points than they actually have.
Misha B is up next and there are no surprises for guessing
what she’s performing seeing as they let it slip at the start of the show when
Kitty had her strop. Her VT depicts her happiness at not being in the bottom
two last week, which gave her the confidence to start bullying again following
a rough week. Shots of Misha thumping a pregnant woman in the womb, giving
schoolchildren wedgies and reviewing footage of the London riots while shouting
“That’s me!” and “There I am again!”. The video assures us that Manchester is supporting
Misha. Because she’ll kick the entire city in the face if they don’t. This isn’t Misha’s best
performance, and she loses further points because she isn’t even dressed as a rhinoceros
or a papier maché newspaper queen to distract from the limp vocals. If Misha
ever finds this blog I’m going to get such a bullying. JUDGES! Louis actually
says that Misha reminds him of a little Chaka Kahn. Or possibly Jackie Chan. It’s
difficult to tell. He’s just bloody doing it on purpose now, isn’t he? Gary
applauds Misha for her work ethic because she’s always had at work unlike other
contestants who sleep all the time. If I were the other contestants, I’d be
very creeped out by the possibility that Gary Barlow may have just admitted to
watching me sleep.
We take a quick break from the performances for the biggest foregone
conclusion in the history of foregone conclusions as Dermot announces who the
returning competitor will be! He tries to strangle some drama out of the moment
before announcing to no one’s surprise that Kat Slater is back in the competition. After a quick intro video to
remind us who she is, Kat steps on-stage wearing very little to perform her
rendition of The Show Must Go On. That’s such a clever song choice given the
circumstances that I refuse to believe it’s deliberate. There’s no way the
producers or Kelly Rowland or whoever gave Amelia that song was witty enough
to be so meta. Considering that Kat barely had two days to pack her bags and
leave Albert Square, learn the song and rehearse it, she does a pretty amazing
job. It’s quite an uneven trade when you consider she’s replacing Frankie. Substituting
Frankie with a wind-up drumming monkey toy would have been a sufficient
exchange, but here we are being spoilt rotten with someone who might actually
be able to sing. JUDGES! Are enthusiastic one and all because they’re hardly
going to fucking well criticise the first person in the history of this contest
to be voted IN to the show by the public, are they? Kelly explains how it tore
her heart out to get rid of Kat and she’s so glad to have her back. Kat grins
evilly and you know she’s totally going to get bullying advice from Misha B and
make Kelly’s life hell.
Join me tomorrow when the producers decide to bring back The
Risk with an all new lineup voted in by the public. Meanwhile, Amelia decides
to burn down The Queen Vic and blame it on Kelly by leaving her weave at the
scene of the crime.
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