The Exeter Factor

This weekend the JJ horns, my unexpectedly productive source of employment this summer, joined the Pogues in Exeter in Devon at the Levellers’ Beautiful Days Festival. The whole event had a kind of olde world festival feeling about it and, by the time we took to the stage at 10:30, pretty much everyone in attendance seemed to have taken their place in front of the main (and basically only) stage to enjoy the set. It was a really lovely gig, and warm and friendly feelings were zipping about the place willy nilly by the time we headed back to the hotel.

The makeshift recording studio on the bus designed to stave off boredom

The following day, the JJs practically had the tourbus to ourselves on the 4 hour drive back from Devon so, as a measure to weather the journey, we collectively numbed our brains with live sampling on Dan’s Macbook and Jackass 2.

I’m not sure what it is about the comforting inanity of a certain brand of trash TV, but it always leaves me wanting more and thus, as I finally flopped down on the sofa when I got home, the spectacle of the first episode of a new series of X Factor was more than my puny, addled brain could resist, so I switched on ITV, poured a glass of wine and let that comatosed feeling of barely interested apathy wash over me. Lovely.

The major change in this series, as anyone who is still reading this is likely to know, is that the audition process is now held in front of a live audience, as opposed to merely in front of a panel of judges (and producers, and camera crew, and lighting guys, and sponsors, and presenters, and grief councillers etc…) as in previous instances. This makes the whole experience ever more indistinguishable from Simon Cowell’s other ITV programme, Britain’s Got Talent, the main difference being that the judges in X Factor don’t have buzzers with which to stop a performance and have to do so just by asking.

Presumably the thinking behind this is amongst other things, partly to avoid the aching stagnation of other long running formats like Big Brother (which apparently has people switching off, or more likely over, in their millions) and partly to prop up the bank balance a little by flogging a few thousand tickets to each regional audition. In any case, it means that the auditionees are now singing to a backing track in front of a huge audience, rather than accapella in front of a small one.

Strangely though, the biggest change the new format has effected seems to be that the judges feel a more urgent need than before to play their ‘characters’ up to the audience, making the whole thing more predictable and pantomime like than ever and giving the whole thing a scripted feel that was always alluded to but never quite so blatant: they’re happily pulling back the curtain on the whole thing, all but screaming “It’s fake! It’s all a big set-up!” and, I suppose, proving that credibility never was the thing that kept the show watchable in the first place.

The show reached its predictable nadir when a returning auditionee said her family had been evicted since the last show and had to spend some time living in the family car, pets and all. X Factor excels in the backstory, so I was waiting for the sad piano music, but it never came: the whole thing got completely played for laughs. They may as well have played some humerous tuba music in the background as Simon responded “so, let me get this straight, your singing got you evicted?”.

This person also happened to be morbidly obese and not the sharpest tool in the box, and it became clear that she, in this show, was a comedy character and that, not only was sympathy for the fact her family were made homeless not part of the plot, it was actually used as a comic turn. That’s pretty dark stuff.

Thus continues the great British tradition of putting down the unfortunate and ugly (this girl) and rooting for the unfortunate but attractive (that guy whose wife died in the last series), all to the accompaniment of sad piano music and a crying footballer’s wife.

Roll on next weekend.