A few brief thoughts on the weekend's X Factor Final. I ignored the show entirely through the auditions and boot camp phases, which is easy to do. I no longer find it funny listening to bad, deluded singers, and I've always zoned-out during the boot camp phase in previous years. I then ignored the live shows because they're so crammed with contestants to begin with, and none of it feels very compelling. It's just karaoke for a month or so. Then, Jedward hit...
Yes, Irish twins John and Edward (with their Everest-high quiffs and grins) were this year's most talked about X Factor contestants, by virtue of being absolutely appalling. They broke through to me on a pop-culture level with their Britney Spears cover "Oops! I Did It Again" (where they even spoke the incidental Titanic-referencing dialogue halfway through.) Funnily enough, when I actually tuned in to watch them live, the fun was lost on me. I saw them sing "Ghostbusters", which was later talked about as a highlight of the Jedward phenomenon, but I just thought it was terrible and embarrassing.
I rarely watched X Factor from then on, but a few of the names stuck in my head, so I knew who was involved. You can't really escape that stuff if you listen to Radio 1 and some tabloids in the week. I guess I watched more of X Factor once Strictly Come Dancing started boring me, too, but I'd still only dip in to see the celebrity performances; from smug Robbie Williams struggling through a door and mistaking his performance as a meet-and-greet, to aloof Whitney Houston and her dress malfunction.
Anyway, the finalists were Olly, Stacey and Joe. A fairly unremarkable bunch, but a part of me would have liked Stacey to win... if only to see the unintentional hilarity of her being interviewed in her breathless Dagenham accent for months to come. There's such a thing as that indefinable "star power" (the reason the show's called "X Factor") and Stacey didn't really have it. I know it sounds elitist, but I'm struggling to think of any well-known female vocalists who speak like an ineloquent Catherine Tate character. 12 million viewers saw Stacey voted off, with many people incorrectly blaming the fact she duetted with Michael Buble (not Madonna, as expected.)
To Sunday, then. Olly versus Joe. Bland and blander. I really didn't care. I suspected Joe would win because he has a better voice and Simon Cowell apparently chose the winner's song (Miley Cyrus' "The Climb") once he got wind of who was likely to win. See, Cowell gets told details of every week's phone vote results, so he knew Joe had been winning the public vote every week for the past month or so. Yes, the show was pretty much in the bag for Joe since mid-November, so all Cowell had to do was cleverly engineer the show to give Joe that final push. It's a sly game of viewer manipulation, this show. That's why Cowell saved Jedward from the chop one week -- so that everyone voting for them to stay just to "annoy Simon" wouldn't have a reason to anymore, because he "gets" them now. And that worked a treat, too.
And you knew Joe would win when he was asked to sing "The Climb" after Olly performed it. The producers always let the expected winner sing second, because it feels like a big, fitting encore when they have to sing it again after being told they've won. So, 19 million viewers saw Joe crowned X Factor winner for 2009. Congratulations. There are already rumours that Cowell is going to try and turn him into the "new Zac Efron", having already picked a Disney-affiliated song as the winning tune, which will also work nicely as a calling card for Hollywood film execs he has some sway with. I guess it might be interesting if Joe goes down the Disney musical movie route, but can he act? Does it matter?
