And the Winner is...

So the X-Factor, that's a cultural phenomenon, contemporary and cool. Exactly the kind of thing an aspiring blogger should be talking about, right?

Well, basically, you can't escape the X-Factor, so if you think you can do it here, you're wrong. It is simply everywhere, even if you don't watch it. Even Chicago Town Pizza is offering free X-Factor tickets, which is a bit of an advertising fail if you ask me. Something similar to B&Q offering free herpes to people lucky enough to buy their toilet-seats. I've not watched it for a whole blissful year and some, but I'm well acquainted with some of the drama, protests, shocks, spills and emotional breakdowns by virtue of having to walk past a newsagent every day. Something about Cher Lloyd gives me the impression she's tipped to win. Or commit suicide, but I suppose the two are not completely dissimilar.

There's even an X-Factor Computer game, which hyperlinked blog does an adequate job of summarising my hopes for:

"However, nothing would make me happier than if it turned out to be like some sort of Mortal Kombat clone, letting Danni Minogue turn into some sadistically toothy beast that can bite Simon Cowell in half, leaving only his high-waisted trousers wondering confusedly around the garish ITV set."

Yeah. That'd be good. Obviously, an X-Factor game is going to be precious little like the X-Factor, but will be like all those other singalong games such as Singstar*, only occassionaly Cowell will project into your living room and tell you to kill yourself. Which is just the ideal Christmas present, if you ask me.

Anyway, I'd like to point out that no one particularly cares about the X-Factor anymore, but I don't like being wrong. For some reason that completely escapes me, people actually like to watch other people sing and dance their way to the finals and gradually have their humanity stripped from them. Not to mention the way they selectively pick awful people so that the whole nation can join together in mocking them, but as is often pointed out to me by 'pro-factors', I'm just bitter and its all a bit of fun and not sick in any way. Of course, suggesting that watching hopelessly optimistic people get relentlessly smashed to pieces is kind of fun, and I'd by a hypocrite to say I didn't secretly enjoy each delicious individual failure, so I guess if the X-Factor did highlights of people's hopes and dreams being crushed, I'd tune in to that with a beer.

Now, we've had our glorious internet based revolution, during which the nation came together to buy expletive riddled angry metal to crush the ambitions of Joe McElderry, which was satisfying, or more to the point send a message to Simon Cowell, but realistically we didn't need to. After all, Sony were the big winners out of that, and I suppose homeless people cared for by Shelter, but to be honest I'd rather cut out the middleman and just help the homeless rather than get one up on Satan himself. It was largely irrelevant anyway, since no one really cares what happens to a reality TV winner after they've won, apart from maybe Leona Lewis, who I grudgingly admit is a pretty good singer. So really, obscurity beckons for whoever wins this years nauseating popularity contest, apart form they get to be resurrected along with other dead people and Z-list celebrities for more reality TV shows.

My thinking? There isn't a winner, apart from everyone who gets really rich out of it. You take an aspirational, beautifully naive and optimistic human being and give them the invaluable gift of hope. Then you subject them to weeks of degradation and judgment and crushing emotional stress. Then you give them a ribbon, a pat on the back and cast them into the outer-darkness until they are required to drag their sorry, bedraggled and fragmented egos back into the galditorial arena that is reality television so we can howl and point and laugh like soulless monsters while they gobble down kangaroo testicles.

There are only losers. Some slight losers, who are mocked and then released, and some bigger ones who go mental under the pressure and then get condemned to a lifetime of servitude to really, really, bad television. And the biggest loser of all?

That's probably us.

*Already mentioned in the blog I linked, I know, but I was already aware of it. Infact, I have harrowing first-hand experience of it. Sometimes I have a reoccuring nightmare in which I am chased down a corridor by tuneless Disney characters singing power ballads while drunk.

Ok, I don't. But it was pretty bad.