The X Factor and the H Factor

TV is a naturally self-reflexive medium and the TV genre which demonstrates this most clearly is the reality game show. Rising above the myriad sentimental mini-stories which makes up the background of its contestants, the real story of each X Factor series is television's power to transform the lives of ordinary people. The contestants are invited into the televisual universe with the promise that they'll never have to go back to their own, non-tube world. This year's X Factor represents the summit of its particular way of executing this promise, due to a perfect blend of hype, suspense, and reasonable singers. Most of all, though, it is being achieved through the X Factor's mastery of the key principle of reality TV shows: transformation.

But here we can see that the X Factor has now gorged on itself until bloated with its own excessive content. Here are the symptoms:

1. Two judges (Tulisa and Kelly Rowlad) who possess minimal credibility - at least when it comes to the business at which they're professing to excel: scouting and producing talent. Discovering talent and transforming the artists into what they wanted is the background of Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh, and ensures they each possess authority. But Tulisa and Kelly are just singers - for all their 'urban' credentials. (And Tulisa protests her urban credentials so much it comes to seem suspicious. I suspect stage school...)

2. No alternative to Walsh's almost uniform praise. This series is giving us the spectacle of one average karaoke performance after another being greeted with a chorus of 'you have a great voice'. Great? Shouldn't that word be saved for something genuinely special?

3. The dismembering and re-assembling of bands by the judges. A feature of this series is under-qualified judges (see point 1) hubristically creating bands, mixing up members of existing bands (which themselves seem thrown together in the first place). This should really be a new kind of XFactor-type show, in which individual singers are slotted into bands designed and managed by the judges and left to fight it out on stage, a kind of musical Bamzooki. Maybe it could be called...Popstars?

Perhaps the most telling of all the symptoms of decadance - more than the vast number of dancers upstaging every act in dazzling displays, more than the hubristic appearance of contestants appearing as 'stars' in an M&S Christmas ad - is Frankie Cocozza's accelerated entire rock n' roll-biography-in-6-weeks demise. Of course this could have happened any year, but somehow it seems as if it could only happen this year, the year the X Factor - or H for hubris Factor - ate itself.