What did you think of X Factor on Saturday night? Viewing figures out today showed far fewer tuned into the show this year than on previous years. 
For our part, if we’d woken up suddenly in front of the TV, we couldn’t have told you whether we were watching an episode from last year or the year before – the set looked the same, the lights looked the same, the audience could have been the same lot as last year and although one judge has changed, from a distance you couldn’t tell.
We also felt very uncomfortable watching one woman’s meltdown as she was told by the judges they were not putting her through.
Pink impersonator Zoe Alexander has reportedly since been cautioned by Police for her foul-mouthed rant.
But we think ITV should be cautioned for showing it at all. Perhaps they believed it made ‘good TV’ but this is a family show and why it’s funny, interesting or great TV to show someone storming off and being goaded into further verbal abuse by shoving a camera into their face, we have no idea.
We can only imagine that they believed showing this shocking footage would give the show a boost – after all, it was hardly riveting stuff.
It seems they also decided to liven things up by getting the judges to be nasty and horrid. Again, it looked as if TV producers had given Mel B a brief, which was to be as horrible as possible. It wasn’t fun and it wasn’t nice to watch either.
Clearly the show can still produce talent – Ella Henderson, 16, was magical, although we would have preferred it if she’d just let her singing say everything about her and not produced a sob story about her granddad inspiring her. He might well have done but it we’ve seen and heard all these sob stories before in zillions of other X Factors and other reality show-cum- singing contests and really believe they should be cut out of the final edit.
Unfortunately, however, even discovering new talent such as Ella Henderson might not stop the rot from setting in on X Factor.
Perhaps it will somehow improve – but somehow we doubt it. The format has been flogged to death and it all seems rather tired and jaded – and the thought of this show now being on prime-time TV ever Saturday until Christmas isn’t a happy one.
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What do you think of X Factor 2012? Let us know your thoughts below…
