I'll be mentioning this particular TV programme fairly often between now and christmas.
Not that I'm a particularly huge fan.
Its just that it now dominates our Saturday evenings.
I don't normally watch much TV since the females in the house mastered the remote control and managed to remember where all the TV Soaps are broadcast and at what times - my life is now spent sitting in the kitchen listening to music on t'interweb, its a sad life but I don't have to speak to them anymore so it has its advantages.
But Saturday night is X Factor night from 7pm through to whatever time they stop broadcasting, its basically on one channel or another for the whole night, and they watch it all.
And so do I.
Its car crash TV at the moment, its the auditions stage, and you watch it through your fingers, hands clasped to your face as you die a million deaths for the imbociles on screen who think they are the next Michael Jackson, you can't bear to watch the wailing, whining, no-marks, and yet you open your fingers just a tad and you watch, you can't help yourself.
They are awful, just awful.
And yet without exception, they all think they are superb.
And thats what makes it watchable.
If they all knew that they were so awful, if they all admitted that they were doing the audition as a dare in front of their mates, then it wouldn't be so adictive, in fact I wouldn't watch it at all.
But the level of self belief in that crowd of audition-ers (100,000 this year) cannot be under estimated. If you could bottle that self belief then this nation would be capable of ruling the world again (without the slavery and assett stripping this time).
People of all ages stand in front of the three professional music makers with an equal opportunity to convince them that they deserve a place in the next round and at that point in time all four of those people believe that this could be the next big recording artist, the next Madonna, the next Jackson, the next Orville the Duck.
And then just ten seconds later you are shrivelling up in your armchair again, or like my eldest daughter last night, howling with laughter for so long that she had to leave the room and stand outside in the rain for ten minutes to regain some sort of control.
Its compulsive viewing until the audition stages are finished, then I start to criticise the talentless try-ers for what they are, kareoke singers at best - and I get stick for it from them, I get told "You can't do any better" to which my stock reply is "Yes, but I know I can't do any better" and thats the difference between the rest of the world and the kids who think they are great singers - we would never put ourselves through all that.
Back in t'olden days when ah wor nobbut a lad there was a well established system for "making it" as a singer or entertainer of any flavour - it was called the "working mens club". Every saturday night working mens clubs all over the land would pay a few bob to someone to come along and entertain their members and if you could stand on a stage in front of a concert room full of working class people who had come to this place on their saturday night only because they had nowhere else to go, and who were really here just to drink enough beer to make them fall over when they left, and who's wifes were with them because it was traditional to take her with you on a Saturday night so that she could play bingo while you boozed in the other bar with your mates, if you could stand on a stage in front of that sort of crowd and leave the stage having completed your act without having things thrown at you, and if you could complete your act without the secretary asking you to leave, and if you could actually complete your act and have the secretary actually pay you, then you knew that you might just have a modicum of talent in your bones.
But all of that is gone.
Trendy bars have attracted the working mens club audience, only old people go to working mens clubs now, and the clubs can't afford to pay for turns to entertain their increasingly elderly members, the saturday night concert rooms now look like a waiting room for the next train to heaven, each male member clutching their quarter full pint glasses and staring at the wallpaper across the other side of the room, occasionally nodding at Nobbie or Fred as they walk past to attend to their ever-more-frequent toilet needs, while their blue-rinsed, bingo-frenzied wives all huddle around a table and gossip about the other women in the room.
The breeding ground of entertainers for generations is dead.
And so we audition them on TV, in front of a saturday night audience of millions.
And it is hilarious.
No comments:
Post a Comment