PREVIOUSLY: Cast your mind back, so long ago, to the first part of the very drawn out finale to the X-Factor 2010, when the following events may or may not have happened: Cher Lloyd went home and didn’t have a massive diva-strop on-stage thanks to the influence of powerful horse tranquilisers! Rihanna and Christina Aguilera literally tried to outstrip one another! Robbie Williams appeared on the show for the fifteen millionth time! Outside broadcasts from the contestants’ home towns made us lose the will to live because I don’t think any of us give a fuck what Melanie the hairdresser who once walked within two feet of Rebecca’s nan thinks about her chances of winning! Katie Waissel held the producers hostage with a shotgun and a demand for another wildcard round giving former contestants the right to a place in the final two!
LAST NIGHT, THE FINALISTS GAVE THE PERFORMANCES OF THEIR LIVES, Voiceover Man booms. NOW, FROM THOUSANDS JUST THREE REMAIN! Yes, I do have to retype everything he said. He completes me, and I’m not going to hear his voice again until August. Or until the next tongue-in-cheek E4 advert. We’re reminded that tonight, one of the 3 remaining finalists will win the X Factor and with it, a life-changing record deal. Life changing in the sense that they’ll get an Xmas number one (unless you’re Joe McElderry, in which case expect a campaign to get a song by a different act from the same global music conglomerate to number one, because showing Simon Cowell his influence is so powerful that he can inspire people to push a song to the top of the charts that would otherwise never have a snowball’s chance in hell of making it there is really going to show him who’s boss, isn’t it?) a less successful follow-up single and a mediocre album. For the last time, Voiceover Man reminds us that IT’S TIME. TO FACE. THE MUNICH!
We begin with... oh balls, a group performance. At least it’s only our three finalists and at least they’re actually singing live. We’re treated to Take That’s Never Forget. You will be shocked and amazed to learn that this segues into an appearance from Take That themselves, in what must be their 48th appearance this month. Just in case you were starting to get bored of Take That, what with the fact that they are literally never off our TV screens these days with appearances on Strictly Come Dancing, any chat-show on after 8pm, and even their own bloody documentaries (such as David Attenborough’s Emmy nominated series on the mating rituals of the Mark Owen after 15 pints and a bottle of vodka), they’ve decided to shake things up by letting one of the ones who never sings take the lead. I think his name is Howard or Jason, but I’m not sure which one, so let’s just call him Howson. Howson does an admirable job of making himself noticed for the first time in 20 years, but Robbie Williams doesn’t take too kindly to having the spotlight diluted so he makes sure that he bleats out his parts as loudly as possible, sounding something like a sheep being raped with a chainsaw. Just in case we hadn’t noticed Robbie enough, he shows up another 24 times in the recap of last night’s performances, desperately trying to sup from the cup of One Direction’s fame like a showbiz vampire.
We have to endure another round of cover versions before the first elimination and then the winner’s songs, and Matt Cardle is up first, with Katy Perry’s Firework. Matt singing a woman’s song? Nice to see them doing something different in the final show. At no point in the performance does Matt wear a bra that fires sparkles into the air, which I guess is something we can all be thankful for. Boom boom boom falsetto boom. His performance is less manic than the one Perry herself gave us a few weeks ago, and his desperation to win is much less grating than her desperation to be noticed and given a judging role on the forthcoming televisual apocalypse that will be the American X-Factor. It isn’t as flawless as several of his other performances, but that’s the stubborn Waissel strain of tonsillitis for you. JUDGES! Louis and his ever-darkening hair say that Dannii and Matt have done a great job. Funny, I didn’t see Ms Minogue up on stage painfully squawking through ever tightening vocal chords for the past 3 weeks. Cheryl says something dense and Simon would prefer if Matt wasn’t wearing neon trousers. We travel via the magic of television to Essex where Stacey Solomon talks to woman who made a pizza that looks like Matt (but doesn’t really). And they say TV is dumbing down.
Fresh from the Disney cloning vats, it’s One Direction! In their intro-video, Curly Headed Bieber explains that if they won, their lives would change forever, and they’re ready for that. Yes, with an average age of about 16 and three-quarters, Bieber Squad have already lived through enough hard times to want out, and if they don’t get that through the X-Factor then they’re going to get it from the barrel of a gun. Do you want that on your conscience? Do you want Bieber Squad to escape their world-weariness with 5 bullets? Do you? That would be like seeing 5 Andrex puppies sitting in a basket in the middle of a motorway and not doing anything to save them from an oncoming truck. Don’t save one life this Christmas. Save five. Vote One Dimension. Tonight, the boys are murdering Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn, which has many layers of meaning for them as it was the first song they performed after being cynically put together as a band by the producers. Okay, that’s one layer of meaning. It actually isn’t a terrible performance. It’s completely in tune for one thing, and I think they even manage to avoid any bum notes tonight. Curly Headed Bieber and Superior Bieber take lead, as ever; Muslim Bieber continues in his established role as the human echo; Inferior Bieber pulls faces in the desperate hope that someone will notice he exists, and Irish Bieber stares into the camera with the cold, dead eyes of a serial sex offender. JUDGES! Louis does the thing Louis always does, where he just basically states material facts of reality: You’re One Direction. You’re five boys. You’re a boyband. You have Y chromosomes. You’re in the final. You could win. I’m Louis Walsh. Fuck me hard. Dannii expresses her belief that the boys will have a career whatever happens, as does Cheryl. Simon says the boys should win because they’d give us something we’ve never seen before. He’s right. We’ve never seen 5 young men sing together before. Except for when Take That did it 10 minutes ago. Or when The Wanted did it 3 episodes ago.
Rebeccabot expresses her amazement at being in the final. And not much else. It’s a really, really short intro video. She probably needed the extra time to sit in her regeneration alcove absorbing electricity. This is the final, after all; she’ll need the extra juice. Rebecca is singing Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), because since upgrading her Operating System, she has begun to experience the randomness of what it is like to dream. Like the other night, not long after she entered hibernation mode, she saw the usual string of Ones and Zeroes but could swear that at several points she saw the number two. On the strength of this performance, it seems a pity that Rebeccabot decided to play it safe(mode) for so long with twee balladry, because she completely knocks this one out of the park. Which is easy when you have a pneumatic, motorised, reinforced titanium skeleton, but still. The dancers are wearing binbags and I think the aesthetic is probably inspired by the apocalyptic future that Rebecca comes from. JUDGES! Louis goes insane and practically begs us to vote for Rebecca. Dannii says it was a fantastic performance and Simon compliments Cheryl on the song choice. Cheryl smiles stupidly and tries to remember if she’s wearing any underwear.
IT’S TIME! TO WATCH! SOME FILLER! We get about five minutes of footage from the audition stages, all of which we have seen countless times before, over and over and over. But just in case you’d forgotten, all your favourites are there: Michael Jackson, Stonehenge Hippie Granny and her long grey hair, that prostitute they sent to Boot Camp, the guy who fell trying to hug Cheryl, the Wicked Witch, the unforgettable Gay And Straight, the Aul Wan in the Blonde Wig who did Pink’s So What, and of course, the pair of teletubbies who started punching one another on-stage. This all leads, inevitably, to most of these rejects making an appearance live in studio performing Bad Romance, concluding with Chavstitute, dressed in Ann Summers’ cheapest dominatrix outfit, descending from the ceiling in a pair of lips trying her best to belt out the chorus and failing miserably.
The voting lines are frozen and we prepare to say goodbye to either Rebeccabot, Matt or Fuckwits United. Dermot wishes all the finalists the best of luck and then proceeds to wait around 40 seconds before announcing that Matt is through. Matt does that annoying fist-biting thing and runs excitedly off-stage. Dermot then announces Rebecca is safe, and we get the absolute highlight of the series as five teenage faces sink in the sort of utter dismay that can only mean one thing: they totally thought they were going to ace it. Crestfallen visages watch as the montage of One Direction’s best bits goes by. Well, four crestfallen faces do. Niall looks more like he’s just realised he left his sketchbook of drawings of Victorian-era European Royalty fucking wallabies with knives in plain sight in their dressing room and desperately wants to get there before anyone else does.
We’re in the home stretch people. It’s time. TO FACE. THE WINNER’S SONGS. Matt’s is a cover version of Biffy Clyro’s Many of Horror, because Simon Cowell actually wants to antagonise the demographic that put Killing in the Name to number one last year. They’ve changed the title to When We Collide, because we can’t have a potential Xmas number one with the word horror in its name. The primary difference between Biffy’s original and Matt’s version is the loss of Simon Neil’s always puzzling mid-Atlantic drawl (always puzzling because he’s Scottish) and the inevitable addition of some high notes. It isn’t the musical abomination many outraged Biffy fans would have you believe – just a straight up cover version by a guy with a decent enough voice with no emotional connection to the song. Measured evaluation not being the Judges’ strong point, they laud it as though it is Matt’s best performance of the entire series, when it is clearly about seven hundred kilometres away from being such a thing. We get some further padding in the shape of a retrospective on Matt’s “journey”, because if it is one thing the X-Factor editors (and indeed all reality tv show editors) love, it’s showing us footage of contestants journeys. Look, there’s Matt singing The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face at boot camp. And look, there’s Matt singing The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face in November. Hasn’t he come so far?
Rebeccabot will be drawing the competitive stage of X-Factor 2010 to a close, with her cover version of Duffy’s Distant Dreamer. That’s certainly one way to make Rebecca a more exciting, relevant singer – have her do a cover of a song by what must be one of the most vibrant, colourful and exhilarating acts of the last 5 years. Oh. Wait. Rebecca looks stunning, probably because she’s aware she’ll have to return to the future soon and wants to look her best for her reunion with Data, Alpha 5, the T-800 and the other members of the Android Collective dedicated to saving us from that dreadful future depicted in that documentary, The Matrix. The performance is nice, just like Rebecca’s dress, Rebecca’s hair and Rebecca herself. I could never see anyone in the world excitedly remarking “I simply cannot wait for the Rebecca Ferguson album”. Actually, I can’t see anyone ever saying that about a Matt Cardle album either. Oh well. JUDGES! Louis pleads for Rebecca one last time, Dannii turns her critique into a statement on Matt, Cowell liked it and Cheryl Cole is a moron. We then have to sit through the story of Rebecca’s journey, which omits the interesting stuff like the struggle of the resistance leaders in the year 2145 to steal the prototype Rebeccabot from Robotnik and send it back in time. The story of Rebeccabot reduces her to tears, proving that even an android can cry. Cheryl says that she really can’t say enough about Rebecca, because she wasn’t aware Bex existed until almost 24 hours ago when Cher got the boot. We head to adverts with a promise from Dermot of a very special guest act...
Which turns out to be Take That. Again. Performing The Flood. Again. That’s right, the celebrity performer for the absolute, honest to goodness last episode of this series of the X-Factor is a band we’ve already seen about 4 times this year, performing the same song they did on the results show broadcast on November 14th. I can only conclude that a very special guest star was booked and then murdered by Katie Waissel in one last desperate attempt to ruin the show and prevent anyone other than herself being crowned champion. Their new album is the fastest selling record of the century, Dermot announces, asininely. It’s the space year 2010, O’Leary. That sort of hyperbole stopped meaning anything ten years ago. Performance over, Robbie Williams enters attention-seeking mode; he starts chanting for “Wagner”, runs around the stage disrobing, then places a firework between his arse-cheeks and does a backflip as it goes off. On the Williams’ scale of public irritation, it registers 5.5 Rudeboxes.
RESULTS TIME! At fucking last. The lights dim. The audience quietens. The fingers of hundreds of Biffy Clyro fans hover over their keyboards, waiting to register their disgust. “The winner of the X-Factor 2010, is...” Dermot says, at 1 hour, 28 minutes and 40 seconds into the show. At 1 hour, 28 minutes and 58 seconds, Dermot announces that Matt has won. Rebecca and her mine-shaped jewellery hug Matt and offer congratulations. Cheryl briefly wonders which of the acts on-stage is hers and if this means she’s won again. Dannii kicks Cheryl in the vagina, universally acknowledged as the only way to inform someone that their hat-trick has been denied. Danni is thrilled – Matt is her big beefy apology to the world for Leon Jackson, after all. Matt is obliged to sing When We Collide again, just to make those Biffy fans mentioned earlier write their letters of disgust to NME even more furiously. The former contestants join him on-stage, and he starts to sob when my boyfriend Aiden throws his arms around him. It better be platonic, is all I’m saying. We get the hilarious moment where Matt punches Dannii, which I watch again and again, pretending that it’s Cheryl Cole instead. And then, just like that, after all the tears, tantrums, Brazilian sex gods and the Irish Shirley Basseys who loved them, chavtastic wannabe Feminems, product placement for Sony Music artists, failed attempts at manipulating public sentiment and more appearances by Robbie Williams than any TV show should be capable of withstanding, it is over.
No comments:
Post a Comment