Community: Real Life

Reality for the insane


Emma

15-year-old Emma is a keen-to-learn schoolgirl with the rest of her life ahead of her. She likes to make people laugh and socialise with friends. In her spare time Emma enjoys catching up on all the celebrity gossip in magazines and hopes to make it as a journalist.

Are you one of the 75,000 hopefuls who auditioned for a piece of stardom in X Factor? If so, you'd better watch out - Emma isn't impressed by any of it.

Have you ever been at home on a Saturday night and innocently switched on the telly? If so it's more than likely you were the visual victim of the nightmare that is X Factor, the second series. Yes, Simon, Sharon and Louis are back again trying to find the next mug to fill the shoes of Kylie or Robbie. The actual reality is that the winner may reach the dizzying heights of Michelle or Steve - and if you can't remember who they are, I rest my case.

The thing is, when the reality bug kicked in, it was great to watch, especially as people were happy and willing to make fools of themselves on national TV. But what should have ideally been a one-off show has been stretched out and morphed into a disaster. Along with Popstars: the rivals and Pop Idol they all make up the conveyor belt of the never-ending stream of pop-focussed reality TV shows. No matter who the presenters are, reality pop shows are basically all the same. This means time and again, we're seeing the same re-hashed format. Surely that's a criminal waste of prime time Saturday night.

"Maybe in their heads they sound great when the power shower's running at home, but for the people watching who have ears, it's terrible."

The key ingredient to the success of X Factor is the brutally honest panel. Simon Cowell - is there one nice comment I can make about this man? The man's such a loser. He wants to stop judging other people and maybe look in the mirror and take note of the ridiculous trousers he's wearing. Up to his armpits. Yet he still has the cheek to tell one poor girl she looked like Vicky Pollard from Little Britain. You can't really be more offensive than that, can you? But as long as it makes for compelling, entertaining TV the judges don't care.

As for the contestants themselves, they ought to learn to sing before they enter such a huge competition. Admittedly, some very talented singers do appear in the audition clips as well but this doesn't make up for the talent-free hordes that appear thinking they can take the crown. Maybe in their heads they sound great when the power shower's running at home, but for the people watching who have ears, it's terrible. Maybe if they let go of their egos for long enough they could acknowledge their utter rubbishness for themselves.

So when will the reality merry-go round come to an end, because, I for one, am getting dizzy and would like to jump off. So please, wannabees, get a life, a job perhaps, that doesn't involve singing for your supper, and give 11 million disbelieving viewers a break from burst eardrums.

Updated: 16/04/2010


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