The new series of The X Factor, which starts on ITV1 tonight, will be different from usual. Well, not completely different. As ever, somewhere near half of the female contestants will bellow an Alicia Keys ballad at glass-shattering volume; we’ll hear tearful stories of the aspiring singers’ “journeys”, usually involving ill parents or drug addictions; and the head judge Simon Cowell will dismiss a contestant with the phrase “A little bit wine bar” or “You’d be great for a West End show.”
The difference is that the pop music talent contest’s auditions will, for the first time, take place in front of a studio audience, like the auditions on Britain’s Got Talent. In the past, the singers auditioned in front of the judges alone.
Announcing the change, Cowell said it would help the contestants because the audience would “support” them. Anyone who’s watched Britain’s Got Talent will find this unlikely, bearing in mind how many contestants on that show are booed and heckled. Still, the singers will have more chances than ever to impress the judges: at auditions they’re now allowed to sing as many as three songs, and, if they wish, can perform to a backing track.
So on 30 June, I went to the recording of one of the auditions (to write about it, I should probably add, rather than sing). It was held at the ICC in Birmingham, in a studio with 2,000 seats. Even though it was a drizzly Tuesday afternoon, almost all were filled. The studio was stuffily hot, the auditions were scheduled to last around four hours, and the audience had queued in the wet for over an hour to get in. Not the ideal conditions for encouraging a supportive mood.
As it turned out, however, the audience wasn’t given much choice about how to behave. “You’re not allowed to boo off any of the acts,” barked the programme’s “warm-up man”. “This is not Britain’s Got Talent – we respect the acts. If you don’t like them, stay silent.”
A 2,000-strong mob, you might think, would be unlikely to take orders from a middle-aged comedian with a beer gut spilling over his belt. Curiously, though, it did. Indeed, instead of booing the bad acts, everyone cheered them, and waved their arms in mock-rapture. If anything, they cheered more loudly for the bad acts than for the good.
A terrifyingly off-key singer who said he wanted to convert viewers to Christ because “I think he’s an awesome guy”; a Mongolian called Eric who yelped a jazz reworking of Kylie Minogue’s Better the Devil You Know; a middle-aged woman who dedicated Simply the Best to Louis Walsh and declared, “I just wanna be taken serious”… were all received as if they were Pavarotti risen from the grave.
The audience was kind to the judges, too. Before recording began, each of the four (Cowell, Walsh, Dannii Minogue and Cheryl Cole) was introduced to us in turn; Cole, the most popular, was greeted by the type of squealing hysteria formerly reserved for boy bands. As she tottered to her seat, a teenage boy asked her for a kiss on the cheek. She obliged. He punched the air as if he’d scored in a cup final.
The audience even had the good manners not to groan at the inane questions the panel asked the contestants. From Cole, for example: “What’s your ambition for this, do you wanna be famous?” The contestant admirably resisted the temptation to reply, “Well, Cheryl, my ambition is to be a fork-lift truck driver and the very idea of fame appals me.”
But, although the audience was more generous than those on Britain’s Got Talent, it created the odd difficulty for the acts. Two bars into one male singer’s a cappella rendition of Ain’t No Sunshine by Bill Withers, the audience started clapping along – hopelessly out of time. Despite the distraction, he reached the song’s end. The judges, unimpressed by his voice, asked him to try a different song. He launched into it – only to find that he was again battling to keep time amid arrhythmic clapping.
Loss of nerve was a problem too. Several of the rejected contestants mumbled that they’d under-performed because they “hadn’t sung in front of an audience like this before”.
On the whole, though, Cowell’s revamp seemed to pay off. The constant cheering (even if it was prescribed) made the judging process feel far less cold and forbidding than usual; now, at least, the hopefuls are having their dreams dashed in a friendly atmosphere.
In the end, the studio audience jeered at only one person. And he wasn’t a contestant.
During a break in the auditions, a man sucking a pink lollipop emerged from a door at the side of studio. It was Cole’s husband Ashley, the Chelsea full-back. He’d sauntered about half way to his seat when the audience realised who he was – and, like the fans of Arsenal, Tottenham and so many other rival clubs, began to boo.
Telegraph 2009
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