'The X Factor' Needs to Stop

A lot has changed in the past ten years. Steps are now basically ABBA. Lindsay Lohan has a Greek accent. Our biggest popstar is a small, hairy ginger man from Suffolk. We eat so many avocados that they are running out. Oh, and The X Factor? The show that single-handedly shaped the entire pop chart landscape in its image throughout the 2000s? Yeah, that's dead now. It's still chugging along, technically – the 13th season will air later this year, and more on that later – but it's also deader than a rotten old slab of cow meat.

When I was a young teenager, though, it was very much alive and galloping. Long before my life became muddied with bills, alcohol, multiple heartbreaks and Instagram, I lived a simple existence, in which winter nights at the weekend were spent indoors, passing a packet of bourbon biscuits between various family members, and gleefully shouting my disgust at whatever poor little chubby schoolboy from Grantham had been dragged through River Island backwards and forced to do a furious dance routine to an upbeat pop rework of the Titanic theme song.

Back then, The X Factor also produced actual stars – Leona Lewis, JLS, One Direction, Little Mix, Olly Murs, Cher Lloyd – and even though the show was objectively shit and formulaic, and the music released afterwards so bland you could not differentiate one song from another, there was a certain level of joy and comfort to be found going through the motions and witnessing the final product. Some woman called Margaret would sing for the first time since her husband died, and Cheryl Cole would squeeze a single tear from her sparkly eyes. Average lads with coiffed hair would be polished into boyband members who would then make loads of money. There would always be a camp novelty act that Simon and Louis would have a panto-style disagreement over. It was awful and dramatic and glorious, and for a while, it felt like it would be here forever, and that would be fine.

But somewhere along the line, it went very wrong. And I'm going to say it was approximately 2012, because that was the year Christopher Maloney – a man who looked and sang like he had corpses hidden in his freezer – came in third place. It was also the year that human misery contraption Gary Barlow told Tulisa she had "fag-ash breath" and that James Arthur won the whole thing, and then promptly became better known for homophobic slurs in a rap diss and allegedly having sex with people while still wearing his woolly jumper and socks. Most crucially, it was the year that the show's ratings began to plummet, and overnight, it was no longer the cultural behemoth it once was. It should have bowed out on a high – but it didn't.

There are plenty of reasons for the show's demise. For starters, there are only so many times you can watch the same format over and over again and not get sick of it. More than that, The X Factor did not change, but the world changed around it. By 2013, Netflix subscribers had reached 40.4 million, as audiences no longer wanted to wait weekly for a Saturday night show when they could watch something way better in one sitting. And, as the Conservative government swooped into power in the UK and austerity began to push poor people even further into the margins, pop culture also began to slowly morph. Suddenly, the shows uber-shiny, money-pumped aesthetic and subtly classist, white-centric snark began to look a little sickly. And maybe it was considered acceptable to exploit people who were possibly suffering from mental distress for cheap laughs in the early 00s, but as the years rolled by, and as wider discussion evolved, that began to look pretty cruel as well.

The way the show was set up also started to look painfully obvious. In the old days, any old Tesco Mary with a set of lungs and a sob story could have a shot at Christmas number one, but as time went on, the auditionees began to resemble little doll-faced, mop-haired clones that the producers had carefully handpicked to be the next Little Mix or One Direction. As we pointed out a couple of years back, "everyone knows the auditionees have been mined in advance from a soulless, barren cavern of peppy, cookie-cutter YouTubers, who are fast-tracked to the final (exposing the duplicitous nature of both the TV shows and the supposedly "real" and "pure" YouTuber culture). The dream, for most average Joe's, is over. And, therefore, so is the format."

Earlier this week, it was reported that instead of accepting its reign is over and bowing out, The X Factor would return for another year, with "big changes to the format". And by "big changes", they will reportedly be "cutting down" on the live shows, so as to resemble it's sister show Britain's Got Talent. Now, call me a miserable bastard, but I doubt some minor format changes will be able to resurrect something that is arguably no longer culturally relevant. Do you remember last year's winner? No, probably not, because he was a bloke called Matt Terry with a quiff and a brown leather jacket who looked like he had cut off Louis Tomlinson's face skin and stretched it over his own, which I feel is a pertinent metaphor for X Factor itself.

Last year's viewing figures for the final were the lowest they've been in the show's history, and if recent news pieces are to be believed, no one is showing up to audition this year anyway. But instead of lobbing the whole thing into the same metaphorical trash can as Top of the Pops, Stars in Their Eyes and Trisha(appreciated for what they were, but accepted as a relic of the past), they are just making it shorter. Which, really, is like eating food that you hate on Tuesdays instead of never, or closing your eyes at a shit party instead of walking out of the house. To be fair, they are contractually obliged to drag it on until 2019, but the real question is: does it break commercially successful artists anymore, and more importantly, would our cultural landscape even notice if it were gone? Nah. Let's wrap this up.

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(Image by Fiona Mckinlay via Wikimedia)