The Problem With The X Factor - The Judges
A few days ago I detailed the whole sorry Sharon Osbourne saga which blighted the show last week. For those of you too lazy to go back and read the whole post, basically Sharon threw her toys out of her pram, and threatened to leave the show. Except she didn’t, because it was probably all a big publicity stunt.
And that wasn’t the first instance of the judges egos taking precedence over the contestants singing performances this series. Right at the beginning of the season, Louis Walsh was supposedly called back from the grave (he wasn’t dead except maybe in Simon Cowell’s eyes) to replace Brian Friedman as a judge. Oh come on, it was planned all along, why was he “fired” in the first place anyway?
And last night’s show, the second of the live final episodes which will run up to near Christmas right on cue for the winner to grab the Christmas number 1 in the UK, we saw more evidence of the problem with this show.
Now don’t get me wrong, I love The X Factor, I sit there religiously tuning in every week along with millions of other sad individuals too boring to be out partying on a Saturday night. But the judges and their participation in the show is ruining the whole thing for me.
The public vote who is their favourite performer of the night, with the two who receive the least votes ending up in the bottom to and having to sing for survival. So far so good. the problem comes when you realise that it’s the judges who then have the final say on who goes and who stays to fight another day. This is obviously wrong.
People have paid good money (and sometimes bad) to phone a premium rate number and get rid of their least favourite by voting up the best singers on the night. But that all comes to nothing if the 4 judges between them decide that a certain singer doesn’t deserve that treatment from the British public.
We saw last night how this policy can be used effectively with the judges voting to keep Alisha Bennett on the show again, even though that’s two weeks in a row that she has been in the bottom two. Daniel De Bourg might have been crap on the night, but if he secured more votes than Alisha he should have stayed, end of.
So between publicity gaining scams, and the final say on who gets booted off the show, I think the X Factor judges Simon Cowell, Louis Walsh, Sharon Osbourne and Dannii Minogue are ruining what was once a good show.
Oh and by the way, Hope are a shoe in to win. It was agreed right from the moment the two solo singer supergroups were formed.
X Factor, Simon Cowell, Sharon Osbourne, Dannii Minogue, Louis Walsh, ITV, Daniel De Bourg, Alisha Bennett, Hope, UK, British
February 5th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
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