After a tortuous, endlessly drawn out two hours of toe curling hyperbole and schmaltz, we finally have a winner! And much to the delight of the Sage, it is not the horrifically untalented gaggle of British Biebers that is One Direction, but instead the relatively harmless, actually quite likeable Essex boy done good Matt who's going to be saturating the nation's airwaves over the next few weeks, even after the potentially fatal setback of wearing hideous bright yellow trousers for his first performance.
It's probably safe to say that Matt is unlikely to join Dylan, Presley and The Beatles in the pantheon of great artists, but what his victory does represent is a pleasing triumph for a genuinely good singer who has worked hard to break into the music industry. Simon Cowell's Frankenstein-like creation of One Direction epitomises all the worst aspects of the X Factor - the cynical manufacturing, the emphasis on style over substance and the blatant exploitation of naive, wide eyed schoolchildren. Mediocre singers, leaden-footed dancers and guilty of a cringingly forced on-stage matiness, their demise should be met with a universal sigh of relief.
The Sage felt a little more sorry for the engagingly shy and awkward Rebecca, who sang beautifully but blandly every week before mumbling benignly in unintelligible Scouse into Dermot's microphone. Of course, it would have been much more interesting had one of the contestants with an actual personality won the show - the sneeringly pugnacious Cher perhaps, or the soulful but grating Katie - but we all knew it wouldn't happen. As usual we were left with a collection of inoffensive nice guys, cooed at by a panel of judges abandoning any attempt at objective criticism to reach for ever more gushingly sycophantic superlatives. Matt was probably the least bad option, and the Sage wishes him well.
One final point on tonight's show - the highly distasteful public humiliation of the X Factor's less gifted auditionees is the modern equivalent of a Victorian fairground freakshow that does noone any credit. While the career opportunities for 19th century dwarves and bearded ladies were presumably somewhat limited, quite what possessed this wretched ensemble of the aesthetically challenged and borderline insane to participate in such an unedifying exercise in self-flagellation can probably only be answered by their psychiatrists. At one point the camera focused on Louis Walsh wearing an expression of pure pity and the Sage for one shared his view.
"A genuinely good singer who has worked hard"? I worry that the Sage's famed sense of objective realism has gone the same way as that of Cowell and his crew of sycophantic 'judges'. Matt's talent is underwhelmingly mediocre, as evidenced by the fact that he couldn't make it naturally by himself. And if standing up on stage once a week for a couple of months is considered enough hard work to earn success, then either I'm mad or the world is. The whole thing is little better than a freak show, as shown the previous evening when they rolled out the hideous two-chinned woman, formerly known as Christina Aguilera.
ReplyDeleteHarsh words sir - I'm not claiming he's a genius, but his performance of The First Time I Saw Your Face was the best of the series in my humble view. Well apart from Wagner doing Elvis of course...
ReplyDeleteI do however agree completely on Ms Aguilera. A couple of years out of the limelight and she seems to have mutated into Bette Midler.