X-FACTOR: EX-FACTOR

Hooray! I’ve finally been cured of my need to watch X-Factor! Hooray, hoorah, and hooray again!

I had been compelled by its magnetic ugliness for far too long.

X-Factor is staged with the sole aim of producing a TV show with money-makingly high ratings and hugely profitable spin-off merchandising opportunities.

Its participants are pawns in a giant game of chess. On one side of the table are the ever-hungry Mr. Cowell and his cohorts, and on the other side is the ever-hungry British TV-viewing public.

As every chess player knows, you have to sacrifice a few pawns in the pursuit of every win (and occasionally a queen, Lynda suggested when she read this).

Some of those taking part in X-Factor Chess might happen to receive benefit – even great benefit - from occupying the board, but, make no mistake, that is NOT the point of play. The point is, of course, the cheque, mate.

Embarrassingly, a couple of X-Factor victims have been students of mine from the MMU (you know who you are, M and D. Well no, sadly, you don’t, do you? You wouldn’t have done the X-Factor in the first place if you did).

But, ha!! No more shall I succumb to its guilt-inducing shows that have had me chuckling at its exploitation of the mentally ill.

No longer shall I have to hang my head in shame after finding myself laughing along with the bullyboy’s gang as the spotlight is turned on the next deluded one to be shoved out to croak and squirm under the hot, panting breath of the judges, and the cold, unforgiving eye of TV cameras.

Never again shall I have to witness the false bonhomie of the X-Factor's unenviable pontificating panel to whom fame and money are never enough; to whom the prospect of getting old is so terrifying they have themselves surgically disguised as younger people.

CUE: StringFing playing the intro to Somewhere in the Night

ENTER: The GRIM REAPER. He speaks from deep within his hood.

“Ah, but inside yourselves, my starry-starry doods, inside yourselves you are older than ever before, and so it goes on and on and on and on like that until you are mine.”

Curtains close as the skeletons in the cupboards of past X-Factor contestants sing: ‘Somewhere in the night violins are playing / The melody lingers, but it won’t be staying’.

If you can’t live with death, you can’t live with life, I say (Oooops! There wasn’t a faintly pleading quality to my voice just then, was there?).

How has this cure of mine been so dramatically accomplished?

How have I, apparently magically, been released from enslavement to my hideous and boorish tippex-toothed master?

I’ll tell you how:

he has brought Sharon Osbourne back in,

that’s how.

Once glimpse of her, one note of her voice was the combined emetic and enema this patient needed. A single moment of chain-shattering (yes, the resonance is intentional), unutterable horror, then: CURED! Wonderful!

Now then, I wonder if there are any crane flies handy that need their legs pulling off?

Tra-abit,

Terry