Masonic zionist Cowell rigs X factor to promote jewish acts like Katie Waissel
Record numbers still watch The X Factor. But one man says the game's up for a cynically manipulated circus .
The X Factor has become the television phenomenon of our age, the juggernaut of Saturday night entertainment, crushing all before it.
It is bigger than any soap opera, more eagerly followed than any football team. And far more young people vote in The X Factor than in any General Election.
Even with the advent of multi-channels and satellite technology, its ratings continue to be colossal. The show’s judges, led by Simon Cowell, are household names, while the winner is almost guaranteed a No 1 hit single.
Yet despite this awesome success, cracks are beginning to show. A sense of exhaustion and ennui is beginning to appear in the programme, however buoyant the viewing figures may appear. Even Cowell can barely disguise his weariness as anxious contestants are brought before him and his panel.
Last week, Sir Elton John spoke for many when he said The X Factor had become ‘paralysingly and brain-crippingly boring’.
It is not hard to see why the programme is losing its sparkle. Like all so-called ‘reality television’, The X Factor has at its heart the idea that the audience is catching a glimpse into the lives of real human characters.
In contrast to the fantasy of fiction and soaps, we are meant to be witnessing genuine participants drawn from real life, rather than actors playing out a role. But the illusion of reality has been shattered. Everything now seems utterly contrived: from the countless sob stories of the contestants to the phoney feuds between the judges; from the overtly sexual dancing we saw on Saturday to the fact that judge Cheryl Cole mimed at least parts of the song she sang on Sunday.
The programme has descended into a grotesque puppet show, with Cowell acting as the cynical puppeteer, pulling the strings of the contestants and the heart strings of the viewers.
Of those who have experienced the machinations of the show first-hand, the outlandish contestant Wagner Carrilho has come closest to pointing out that the emperor has no clothes.
‘Nobody tells Simon Cowell what to do,’ he said in a phone call to a friend, which was leaked to a tabloid newspaper. ‘The public do not decide who is going to win. It is Simon Cowell.’
That view was given further fuel by the revelation yesterday that contestant Katie Waissel is not the newcomer that many viewers believed her to be, but was talented-spotted by Sony six years ago.
Sony is a partner in Cowell’s Syco record label, the company set up to manage the commercial potential of The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent — although there is no evidence that her links with Sony assisted Katie on The X Factor.
In its decline in integrity, The X Factor is all too reminiscent of Big Brother, the smash hit reality TV show which has finally been taken off the air after its slide into self-parody.
When Big Brother (for which I was briefly employed as an adviser) began in the late 1990s, it had an air of innocence, and viewers were genuinely intrigued to see how a group of disparate people would react to each other, cooped up in a claustrophobic environment.
But any pretence of ‘reality’ in Big Brother soon evaporated as the show became little more than a parade of shallow, celebrity-fixated exhibitionists.
When The X Factor began in 2004, the programme also had some of this innocent excitement. It marked a modern, high-tech revival of the old-fashioned talent show, which had been epitomised by programmes such as Opportunity Knocks (presented by Hughie Green) and New Faces.
New Faces finally disappeared from our TV screens in 1988, when the whole talent show was widely regarded as formulaic and outdated.
It took the creative insights of Simon Cowell to demonstrate that the format could be reinvented with a fresh appeal to modern audiences. The mix of audience participation, celebrity judges, mass voting and eager ambition proved a huge success.
But what began as an uplifting search for genuine talent has been turned into a gigantic exercise in deceit and exploitation.
The truth is that Cowell developed The X Factor from its less successful predecessor Pop Idol so that he could maintain full recording rights over the winning act.
This has worked superbly, with his company Syco raking in a fortune and Cowell becoming one of Britain’s richest men.
The X Factor has built a seemingly unstoppable conveyor belt of hits, producing no fewer than 16 No 1 singles during the first six series.
Yet there is a profound sense that the show just chews up the winners and then spits them out. Hardly any of the winning contestants have enjoyed long-standing success. From that long catalogue of hit singles, just one singer — Leona Lewis — has gone on to become a household name. Most of the other winners, such as Shayne Ward, Leon Jackson and Steve Brookstein, are now almost forgotten.
The failure to build lasting success shows the cynical, manipulative nature of the programme. The X Factor has become all about hype rather than a real quest for talent. That is why, in the long run, it has been so poor at unearthing true ability.
Every element of the show has become false, designed to whip up a hysterical atmosphere, building up the drama towards the tear-stained climax of the final.
In this pantomime, Cowell portrays certain contestants as villains, openly telling them he ‘doesn’t like’ them. This was the role he gave to the twins Jedward in the last series and to the singer Storm Lee in the current one.
Indeed, every contestant is given a character they have to play. So, as in a crude version of Cinderella, we currently have the Tesco employee Mary Byrne, a middle-aged, overweight singer, hoping to get to the ball.
The X Factor is all about illusion rather than reality because the producers are determined to play with the emotions of the audiences.
It is, of course, a slightly absurd analogy, but it’s interesting that many of the characteristics of the world’s worst authoritarian regimes are visible: the cult of personality, the carefully orchestrated rallies, the suppression of individuality by iron-fisted orthodoxy, the constant barrage of propaganda fed to the media.
There is also a strong sense of the total control that Cowell and the rest of his team exert over the contestants. We got some idea of this last Saturday week when the losing duo Diva Fever complained that they had no choice over the song they had to sing, even though they were deeply uncomfortable with it.
But the apparatus of suppression, such as confidentiality agreements and the distant promise of success, ensures that dissidents never speak out while they are in the show.
The contestants aside, I would also argue that The X Factor has had a detrimental effect on our society.
This country used to be renowned for its quiet reserve and stoicism, but today we seem the very opposite — constantly given to public demonstrations of emotion.
Thanks to shows like The X Factor, so many people — especially the young — seem in a state of noisy turmoil, alternating between screeches of delight and wails of anguish.
Moreover, The X Factor’s emphasis on hard-luck stories has encouraged the fashionable cult of victimhood, where even the mildest setback is whipped up into a huge drama.
At the same time, there is also an absurd amount of histrionic self-regard among contestants, such as when we hear some 17-year-old proclaiming: ‘I’ve been fighting for this all my life,’ as if preparing for the D-Day landings.
Recently, the distinguished writer Anthony Horowitz, the creator of such great TV series as Foyle’s War, voiced his concern that The X Factor was afflicting British drama because of audiences’ demand for instant emotion all the time.
Perhaps even more importantly in these times of economic difficulty, the show is helping to undermine the values and skills that we need to rebuild our nation, since it promotes the belief that celebrity culture is what really matters, not public service, or entrepreneurship or hard-earned professional skills in such fields as engineering.
Thankfully, I suspect that the show is already past its peak — and that before long, just as happened with Big Brother, audiences will start to turn away from this cynical and jaded formula.
When even Simon Cowell looks bored, the game must soon be up.
SOURCE
|
