'X Factor' fix is the symptom not the problem

CHERYL COLE has a book, a record and a lot of shampoo to sell. Dannii Minogue also has a book, a perfume and it seems you couldn’t open a newspaper or magazine without a glimpse of her with a clutch bag and in a cocktail dress as one of the Christmas faces of Marks & Spencer. (Oh, and Matt Cardle is the nominal winner.)

Simon Cowell is systematically taking over the world one arched eyebrow at a time. Okay, well maybe not the world but certainly commercial network TV in Britain and beyond.

Through his media production company, Syco, he is involved in The X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent and American Idol, but he has also had a major impact on the music and entertainment industry in Britain, Ireland, mainland Europe and the USA.

Syco, through a collaboration with Sony, has sold 180million records and in mid-November managed a feat not seen since The Beatles were in their pomp. Susan Boyle had the Number 1 album in Britain and the USA with her new release called The Gift. Last year, Susan Boyle’s debut album sold 8million copies in six weeks.

In TV-land, The X Factor has in recent weeks become yet again one of the most talked, blogged and written about TV programmes. Its audience share has peaked again surpassing records it set in the run into last year’s final weeks.

In 2009, Irish audiences debated the foibles of John and Edward Grimes and Jedward have now become part of the national discourse.

This year it was the health, mental and physical, of Mary Byrne that grips the nation as she battled with the pressures and tensions of weekly live TV performances and the fickle voting nature of British and Irish TV viewers.

Is X Factor real? Is it fair? Is there cheating? Well, honestly, none of this really matters. And, for the record, the answer seems to be No, No and Yes.

This X Factor series has been dogged with more accusations of foul play than any of the previous years. It began with allegations of selective use of autotune technology, so some contestants might gave been given an unfair advantage. For the record X Factor producers have admitted that they use the technology on the show.

Since then there have been a series of allegations surrounding how the judges decide to vote when there they are down to choose between two luckless contestants. Dermot O’Leary, the X Factor host, has been the centre of these allegations but he has distanced himself from any claims of cheating.

Mary Byrne did the same and said:

I fear I have been misquoted from last night and would like to clear it up. I did not think that the show was a fix.

Cowell might seem like a coldly calculating Svengali but his real stroke of genius which he ritually repeats is to tap into society’s insatiable need for competitive entertainment where the public are active participants.

One of the key facets of the TV era is the desire for audience members to be pitted against themselves and judged by their peers, or for the audience to be judge of whichever public personality steps into the spotlight. X Factor and its Saturday night competitor, Strictly Come Dancing, are just the latest editions of an old formula.

Opportunity Knocks was originally a radio competition where each week contestants would sing, dance, tell jokes and sometimes do all three for a studio audience, whose applause was measured on a ‘clapometer’ giving a winner on the night. Those at home would post in their nominations for winners, with the postal vote winner announced the next week.

Hughie Green's 'Opportunity Knocks'

The late Hughie Green became the TV host of Opportunity Knocks, from 1964 to 1978 and it was one of the top TV programmes of its era.

New Faces was a similarly themed show, and just as successful, that introduced the context of studio judges, ‘industry experts’, to comment and measure the performers.

There have been over 1,500 different game shows aired on British television since broadcasting began in 1948. In Ireland, we are no different from our British counterparts and the history of RTÉ and more recently TV3 is filled with either clones of British and US competitions, or we distill our unique brands. The late Bunny Carr’s Quicksilver RTÉ TV general knowledge quiz, which ran from 1965 to 1981, stands out particularly as the high-watermark in this genre.

The last three years of the Irish version of The Apprentice has been the most-watched programme on TV3. It is based on the British version which was itself based on the 2004 US original with Donald Trump in the hot seat but has brought a particularly Irish feel to the programme. Bill Cullen’s weekly demand that contestants show their ‘liathroidi’ is just one element of a unique Irish slant on this show.

This year, The Apprentice has had an average audience of 513,000 viewers while the Irish audience of The X Factor had a peak of 821,000 on October 17^th. In Britain, The X Factor has got more than 11million viewers while Strictly has hit 8million.

There are those who scoff and deride the shows, strangely enough they get their chance to ‘vote’ on it by buying an alternative Christmas record.

Last year it was a social media campaign that led to Rage Against the Machine’s song, Killing in the Name, getting the Number 1 best-selling single at Christmas, pushing X Factor winner Joe McElderry into second place.

The X Factor phenomenon doesn’t belong to Simon Cowell. Yes, he has profited hugely from it as its owner, but it is more about us as TV viewers and what we like to watch. It would be nice if there wasn’t so much marketing and advertising around the product’s icons but that is a little bit more about global capitalism than what we want to do on a Saturday night.