X Factor 2012 Semi Finals

IT’S TIME! To shine bright! LIKE A DIAMOND!

This week’s themes are “Songs for You” and “Songs to Get You to the Final” which even by the X-Factor’s brilliant standards is pretty damn vague. What if Union J decided that the song to get them to the final is a thumping cover version of Smell Yo Dick? James Arthur could choose to perform an arms-aloft, lighters-in-the-air, stripped back guitar-driven acoustic version of Du Hast. Frankly the vagueness of the themes could lead to utter chaos. Anyway, the first half of this exercise in predictable nonsense will be the Song for You, which is dedicated to a special someone in the contestants’ lives. I already know right now that Union J’s song is going to be dedicated to THE GIRLS. Just wait.

Christopher Maloney is up first, ready to batter You Raise Me Up about the face until it no longer resembles anything approaching the song it once was. Needless to say, Chris is dedicating his performance to Me Nan, the evil bitch who’s responsible for dragging Christopher to the auditions and ruining all of our lives. Fuck you, Nan. Nan is a haggard old crone who cavorted with the darkest of magicks in order to summon a juvenile hell demon from beyond the walls of the ninth circle of the underworld. That demon grew up to become the shatterer of worlds, lord of darkness, prince of torment himself, Christopher Maloney.

I’ve been further scrutinising the Book of Revelation and other apocalyptic texts for signs of the forthcoming Chrispocalypse. Did you know that 28 Days Later is actually a documentary from the future? The opening scenes occur just one month after Maloney’s grim victory. Anyway, Chris’s performance is the sort of overwrought shit you’ve come to expect from the emotionally-void ballad queen. He stares earnestly into the camera, doing his best approximation of feelings while secretly plotting where he’s going to build the furnaces he’ll use to burn the corpses of his enemies. Towards the end, a choir appears, and Me Nan descends from the ceiling in full-on angel regalia. Chris catches her and they embrace. He sprouts a pair of fangs as his face contorts into a vampiric nightmare, and proceeds to drain Me Nan of several pints of blood.

JUDGES! All three judges take the if-we-compliment-Chris-maybe-his-fans-will-think-he’s-safe route. I hope it works.

Sexual terrorist Jahmene Douglas is up next. What song could come from his heart? Oh, it’s a song for his dead brother. Great.  How am I meant to make fun of Jahmene when he keeps using his VTs to reflect on what has officially been A Really Shitty Life™? Oh wait, I’m a horrible person, that’s how. So Jahmene is singing I Look to You in Dedication for his brother, who is dead and thus does not exist anymore and thus isn’t aware that Jahmene is singing this song for him. Wasted opportunity, Jamelia. You could’ve dedicated this song to Chris’s Nan instead, thus making the public inexplicably more likely to vote for you. This being Jahmene, the song is so loud that his brother actually returns from the dead, approaches him disinterestedly and says “Give it a rest, mate”. Though actually, as it progresses I have to admit it’s not as loud as usual and somehow less effective for it. Like, normally when Jahmene sings I have to take refuge behind several solid wooden objects to avoid feeling like my bowels are being blasted with an experimental sonic weapon. This week, I just feel like I have two speakers strapped to my ears while a gorilla punches me in the stomach.

JUDGES! Nicole shudders her way through a barrage of questionable tears and gets an Awww from the easily manipulated Awwdience. Seizing her moment, she then enters a state of religious rapture in which she compares Jahmene to a little baby Jesus and decides that his Heavenly Sonic Weapon of Mass Destruction is about the only thing that can stop Chris’s forthcoming rampage. Well, that’s what I took from it anyway. The rest of the judges say nothing, stunned into silence by Nicole’s insanity.

Union J, unfortunately, made it back from the Late Late Toy Show in one piece. Which is a shock, because Poor Man’s Harry Styles looks an awful lot like a troll doll, so I really did think they’d just bundle him up with the rest of the toys and send him to a landfill. That’s what they do after the Toy Show, you know. Ignore all that shite about bits and pieces going to charity, each individual toy is smashed and then set alight by an army of sadistic minions while the font of human misery that is Joe Duffy watches, masturbating furiously. However, I digress. As I said the boys made it back from the Toy Show without being immolated by Joe, which means that we have to endure the Union J intro video. Last week they thought they had done enough to escape the bottom two. But they didn’t! This week they have a massive strop about it and can’t understand why no one likes them. It’s because you’re shit, boys.

Who are they going to sing a song to? THE GIRLS, of course. Well, it’s actually their fans, but we all know that Union J’s fans are THE GIRLS, because that’s what the show has been telling us for the past 9 weeks, and the X-Factor wouldn’t lie. But their song isn’t just for the girls, it’s also relevant to dick-loving nancies like Gaymi because the song they’ve chosen is See Beneath Your Beautiful, a song that was written entirely to piss off people who like proper grammar. It’s a noisy, tuneless mess with overpowering background music and even more Josh than last week. Frankly, I'm sick of Josh. Poor Man’s Harry Styles must’ve really done something horrible to warrant this treatment.

JUDGES! Are too busy doing crossword puzzles to pay the blindest bit of attention to Union J. 

James Arthur would like to make a confession now. He’s had an ulterior motive in being in this competition all along. You see, he isn’t just in it for the music, doing it for the sake of letting the rhythm leave his soul in a cascade of emotion, because that’s just who he is, dammit. No, the other reason he’s on this show is to try and impress a lady. And he’s ready to come right out and dedicate this song directly to the evil witch who cursed him and made him look the way he does. If he can just make her happy once, he’ll turn into a beautiful prince. Or into a less hideous young man. Tonight, he’ll be singing One by U2, which is dedicated to his sisters and brother. They all made something of themselves, while James laboured under the weight of his terrible curse.

Oh look, this week James has decided to perform a tedious guitar driven cover version of a beloved rock song. It’s nice to see him challenge himself. The staging would’ve been a hundred times better if it was performing this song in profile, then halfway through he does a 180 about-turn to reveal the other half of his body is in blackface as Mary J Blige. That would’ve been a major swerve. A wild choir appeared to sing over the horrendous noises emanating from the dark sewer of James Arthur’s face-anus. It doesn't improve things, in much the same way as spraying CK One directly onto an elephant's arse wouldn't make you more likely to put your face in it.

JUDGES! Louis announces that this time next year James will have 5 albums out. So that’ll be the debut album in March, an album of swing covers in May, the difficult second album in July, a compilation of Xmas covers in November, and a Greatest Hits release for Xmas 2013. James Arthur: career sorted. Tulisa thinks the performance was enough to send him through to the final. So hopefully he doesn’t even need to bother with a second song then. Gary describes it as an amazing performance, crying tears of pure jealousy while hammering his desk and shouting out “Why couldn’t I have been your mentor? WHYYYYY?”

And with that we’re on to theme two, Songs to Get You to the Final. Which is even more redundant than the first theme, because when you think about it, isn’t every song they’ve ever sung thus far on the show a song they hope will get them to the final?

Jahmene has chosen to sing At Last, the song from his original audition. I stared at beginning of this paragraph for a few minutes, and I thought to myself “Holy Odin, isn’t Jahmene boring?” I mean, I tried imagining that he was a serial killer, I tried pretending he was being controlled by two alien organisms attached to his eyebrows, and now I have to try pretending he’s the Anti-Chris, the only force on Earth capable of preventing Herr Maloney from walking away with the competition and destroying the human race in the process. But when it comes down to it, Jahmene is just so fucking boring that I find myself forced into writing paragraphs like this, wherein I offer up a slight insight into the frustrating lengths I have to go to in order to make him interesting to me, and conclude by letting you know that it was all for the purpose of getting some words on a page to fool you into thinking that I had actually managed to write something about Jahmene, Lord of Boring.

JUDGES! This time around Nicole managed to avoid speaking in tongues or proclaiming the return of the Messiah. Louis Walsh puts random phrases together from the Louis Walsh soundboard, as he is wont to do.

Chris has decided that the song to get him through to the final is a boring Michael Bublé number. Michael Bublé is a cunt. Just thought I’d mention that. Continuing to mine the vein of rich post-apocalyptic fiction for references to Christopher, how about this one from that most violent, bloody and sexually deviant of tomes, The Bible: On the Lord's day, I heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet, Saying, “Me Nerves”; And I turned to see the voice that spake with me. And being turned, I saw seven items from Zara and Topman, adorning his frame as though the mutton were a lamb; His head and his hairs were shorn fine, and his eyes were seemed to peer at me as though from a peculiar staging choice – “People say I’ve lovely eyes” he thundered; his voice as the sound of many waters. And he had in his right hand a microphone held as though ‘t’were a scythe: and out of his mouth went a sharp two-edged sword: and his countenance was as radioactively orange as the sun; And when I saw him victorious, I fell at his feet and cried, for I had put 20 euros on James Arthur to win.

You will notice I’ve said nothing about Chris’s actual performance, preferring instead to rerun a joke from last week’s recap. You’re very observant like that.

JUDGES! Join with the nations of Earth in weeping at Chris’s continued existence.  

Union J. They decide that they’ll spend their second VT promoting Westlife songs, which is a step up from the first VT where they basically said they hate the public for not voting for them. There’s a fake scene from “5 weeks ago” where Louis says he’ll wear a onesie if they make it to semi final. Cue Louis wearing a onesie during their rehearsal and oh, just fucking kill me now. This is the most contrived thing they’ve done this year, which considering how this show can make Tallafornia look like the work of David Attenborough at the best of times, is saying a bit.

JUDGES! Basically tell the boys they’re going home. Except Nicole, who barks random words like shamazing and onesie at Louis Walsh in no discernibly sensible manner. Louis will do whatever you want him to do to get Union J into the final – he’ll wear a onesie, he’ll have sex with a woman, perhaps he might even SHUT THE FUCK UP.

Finally, it’s James Arthur. In his VT he says that the X-Factor saved his life! He doesn’t explain how, though. Maybe he was choking on a piece of chicken a few weeks ago and Nicole performed the Heimlich manoeuvre. James’s song is The Power of Love performed in the style of a spectral mist that clings to the ghostly form of a banshee. It’s one of those James Arthur performances that the judges will no doubt describe as “intense”, and involves a lot of wailing because you convey emotional pain by screaming as though you’ve just been circumcised by a rusty nail.

JUDGES! Gary says that James is so exciting that people will have stopped ironing or washing their dishes to pay attention to that performance. Wow, that’s such a compliment. That’s like telling our wife she’s so pretty you’d consider making love to her right after you’ve finished having a poo. Nicole calls it transcendent. If Nicole is to be believed then every performance tonight involved shattering the walls of reality or otherwise ending up in a state of ascendant ecstasy somehow. I think she’s moved on to opiates.

RESULTS!

There's a group Song with Rod Stewart which basically involves everyone saying “Merry Christmas” over and over again for four minutes. Thankfully, there are no female contestants left in the show for Rod to impregnate. Then Tulisa sings, which is horrifying. At no point does it rain on her, which means she’s nowhere near as good as Rihanna was last week. It’s also nowhere near as entertaining as Kelly Rowland’s manic striptease when she performed on last year’s semi-finals. Tulisa fail.

Pink comes on and sings that boring song that has the video with somewhat disturbing domestic-violence undertones that I try to ignore because the guy in it has an amazing body. Then she eats Dermot O’Leary up and spits him out for being a tool because she’s Pink and she can do that.

Actual Results Time! To absolutely no one’s surprise, Union J go home, setting the stage for an epic battle of good versus evil next week as Jahmene takes on Christopher for the X-Factor 2012 crown while courst jester James Arthur looks on, trying to forget that no one who’s been in the bottom two has ever won the show.

NEXT WEEK: The ultimate battle of good versus evil, featuring Rihanna, Emeli Sande, One Direction, Kylie Minogue, all the previous contestants, James Arthur, laboured apocalypse jokes and the knockdown, end-of-the-world contest between Shake 'n' Fake and Jahmene, the Anti-Chris. It all takes place over two two-hour specials, which basically means that fuck all happens on the Saturday one and then all hell breaks loose on Sunday. You know you have nothing better to do, you pathetic mess.