“Welcome to The X Factor, you’re Saturday night starts right here!” Dermot O’Leary’s words echo through the living room as every generation of my family watches. The year is 2007, then it’s 2008, then 2009, as we repeatedly tune in, captivated. And then, we stop.
Like many households across the country, we lose interest in what was once iconic, exciting television. There may be new contestants but we already know the storylines: the small-town girl who looks like a popstar, sounds like a popstar, and may just well become a popstar, the over 25 ‘joke act’, the naive solo artists pushed together to be the next big boy/girl band. Before its quiet cancellation in 2020, The X Factor had already become irrelevant to many. This was until the recent BBC Radio 4 podcast Offstage: Inside The X Factor.
Hosted and written by Chi Chi Izundu, the podcast features interviews with former contestants and production staff who reveal the secrets behind the show which never made it into the Saturday night edit. With complaints including leaks of personal details to the press, producer manipulation, and very limited aftercare, Offstage adds a sour taste to the nostalgia. It raises the question of not when The X Factor will come back but if it even should.
In primary school, my friends and I used to play “X Factor”. One of us would be a contestant, one Cheryl, one Louis Walsh, and,
However, this audience power was largely an illusion. No, the phone lines weren’t rigged but the edits debatably were. Bradley Hunt, one-half of former act Bratavio summarises that each contestant fits into a producer-designed category: “really good, really bad, or storyline.” We were guided on who to root for and against through camera close-ups and selective editing with Westlife’s What About Now guaranteed to play anytime the producers wanted us to invest in the drama.
As well as this, the first audition was never truly the first audition. Contestants had multiple auditions with producers before even meeting the judges. According to a former X Factor producer, named Stacy in Offstage to protect her privacy, auditionees were unknowingly coded with labels such as “E” for “entertaining” and “PKO” for “potential kick-off”. She then goes on to reveal that production staff would then coach them to create these desired narratives by winding them up or telling them they might be able to turn a no to a yes if they beg. This high degree of manipulation transformed contestants into characters; great for the heroes, horrible for the villains.
The X Factor operated as a drama under the disguise of reality TV. However, it forgot that the lives of its contestants continue after the end of the episode. If contestants were picked to be the ‘really good’ part of the show, career successes from the likes of Little Mix, One Direction, and Leona Lewis certainly prove the positive transformational power the show could have. However, when contestants were picked to be ‘really bad’ or the ‘storyline’, it could be immensely traumatising. Izundu describes The X Factor as ‘gladiatorial’ and this perfectly captures the high stakes of the show with a million-pound recording contract and a possible Christmas number one both on the line. However, contestants were often sent into this arena armourless in a humiliation ritual broadcast for the nation.
The X Factor’s reliance on the ‘really bad’ alongside the ‘really good’ is why the show probably could never return or at least not in its original design. Since 2021, reality TV broadcasters are required to protect the welfare and wellbeing of contestants. It is difficult to think how an X Factor series could be produced that obeys these guidelines when for many the bad and angry auditions were their favourite bit. The Voice UK, The X Factor’s nearest counterpart, doesn’t use ‘kick-off’ moments or ‘joke acts’ for entertainment, however, it receives only a fraction of The X Factor’s peak viewership despite occupying the same Saturday night slot on the same channel. It seems that within talent TV, many of us no longer feel comfortable witnessing people carved into the bad contestant against their consent but dialling down the drama doesn’t satisfy us either.
Despite this, I don’t think The X Factor has entirely disappeared. Scrolling through TikTok, now and again I will see an old X Factor video and I will admit I don’t always scroll past. As well as auditions resurfacing on social media, The X Factor branded YouTube channels regularly upload old clips of the show and receive millions of views. The appeal of these shorter videos is the opposite of X Factor’s original draw: they remove all storyline. When you watch online, context is erased and you invent your own narrative in a way that revives the entertainment value while maintaining comfort because you don’t know what happened to that person after, good or bad. The comments on these videos can be lion’s dens with words sometimes even crueller than Simon’s harshest remarks. Once more we get to play judge.
Looking back, The X Factor seems a relic of ruthless 2000s pop culture where mainstream TV was allowed to be meaner. Now knowing the different aftereffects of this cruelty, I don’t think ITV would commission another series. However, as X Factor clips repeatedly resurface online, many contestants have gained fame that has lasted a lot longer than fifteen minutes and often not in the glamorous way they anticipated. The television slot may no longer permit The X Factor’s entertainment creation methods, but the internet does.
So, could The X Factor ever come back? The truth is it never truly went away.
Words by Jennifer Cartwright
References
Izundu, Chi Chi, “Offstage: Inside The X Factor”, BBC Radio 4, BBC 2024, 27 January 2024, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001vtth [10]
“Protecting people taking part in reality shows” Ofcom, 06 October, 2023, https://www.ofcom.org.uk/news-centre/2023/protecting-people-taking-part-in-reality-shows
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