Why I hope The X Factor never returns

My job was to write about The X Factor week on week but upon reflection I’m hoping it never rears its ugly head again...

Willkommen! Bienvenue! Welcome!

Funny things happen when you leave your job as a gossip columnist. Firstly, you realise the world you were a part of was a murky one and you’ll do all you can to move away from that as quickly as humanly possible.

I’ve mentioned it before but leaving that sort of job after 15+ years of service really takes it out of you. The energy needed, the speed and pace of life and generally just how you make it work being out nightly and at your desk for 10am. Well, maybe it was more like midday for me. I was known for doing the party circuit and having monster hangovers – therefore getting into the office occurred when I was able to function. The hours were long and torturous. 

I admit I once rang in saying I was going to be late because my train from the sticks was stuck at Kingston due to a “Swan on the Track”. No kidding. An actual swan. I was there for some two hours.

From then on whenever I had a hangover, I’d text one of my bosses and tell them there was a swan on the track. They got it immediately. Aside from the original yarn, there was never another swan on said track. I was just dying with a hangy.

Anyway, SURE being a columnist wasn’t exactly working down mines. It had some fabulous moments. Reflecting on those crazy days after I’d left was hard. The endless partying that went down meant some ten years later – after leaving my final position at the Sunday Mirror - I realised I had what I now deem a form of PTSD from the things I was asked to do, the things I’d witnessed and how I’d conducted my life.

It took a whole lotta therapy and general chat with friends to realise all that had gone on. How had I’d managed my personal life at the same time as that job? And how did I manage to get through it with my morals still intact? I think more than anything I was just brought up right.

One of the first things I immediately did when I left the papers was stop watching most terrestrial television. Without realising it, the shows I was swerving were mainly programmes on ITV. In fact, I naturally stopped watching the entire channel. Day or night. ITV just didn’t work for me anymore. I rarely watch it even now.

You see, when I looked at my career covering all the various shows on that channel, I came to a realisation that it was full of hate. I just had this feeling in my stomach that ITV shows weren’t serving me a good purpose. To me, it felt like they were continually pitting people against each other, goading the papers and mags for sensationalist headlines (the noughties version of clickbait) and generally it felt murky like the papers. Murky AF.

Much of the last four years of my life at the Sunday Mirror was about covering a little show called X Factor. I’d interview the likes of Simon Cowell, Louis Walsh, Dannii Minogue and Cheryl Cole on a weekly basis. Well, in general I’d get one big sit-down exclusive interview with each of them per series. Then throughout the season Louis would usually text you his version of events, so he got his propaganda into print. Classic Louis. Always wanting to create drama – and probably not to be left out…

Headlines were often written before I even left to go out to do the interviews and the editors had their own idea of what they wanted to achieve from the Splash attached to my interviews. That never made me role easy and, to be frank, those editors that did that were big ol’ turnips.

Once the judges were out the way, I’d then be interviewing the contestants in ‘sit downs’ (some round tables and some solo) and their stories would usually be blown out of all proportion with no consideration for the human trapped within the equation. You know, some had huge family dramas that made for a great headline. Some were struggling with their sexuality and coming out. And that would be deemed fodder. I was always exceedingly careful never to cross the line with that sort of story unlike some of my competitors. Then other contestants you could tell were literally petrified by the entire process and they were scared about what we were going to write, and they had a right to be.

I recently did an interview for a BBC radio podcast about the negatives regarding the show and the presenter kindly (NOT) decided to bring up an interview they’d carried out with a contestant who had been tortured for years over a short piece I’d written about her and how the public had turned against her deeming her unlikeable. They played out a clip for me to hear. It was hard to listen too.

She’d had to get therapy for the piece and said it had deeply affected her mental health. The worse truth about this matter – I literally couldn’t even remember the contestant in question. Totally horrendous, really. If I’d known then what this piece would have done I’d have felt like shit about it. But I guess part of the role I had was to fill column inches and I’d imagine this was a filler piece we had to do last minute to fill a hole in a spread. It was kinda shitty for that documentary to not inform me they were going to do that. But hey, a taste of my own medicine? Probably. I won’t be doing another podcast with them.

So, what do I remember clearly about those days? Well, I remember the machine behind the shows like X Factor. I remember the people (or puppet masters) behind the scenes who were constantly working to drum up drama, whispering stories into your ears in the corridor, creating a scene backstage and playing with the lives of each and every person attached to X Factor. It wasn’t pretty for anybody involved. If you went into the show they owned your ass. Stat.

Obviously, Simon Cowell was the head puppet master and has a lot to answer for...but I fear even today he wouldn’t admit his part in the negativity attached to the show.

It wasn’t just the contestants whose lives were ‘played’ with on this show. The judges were seriously messed with too. The Dannii Minogue years were beyond hard to watch – especially from the inside of the snake pit. I saw first-hand how the female judges were pitted against each other. Dannii was bullied like you have no idea. There were tears behind the scenes and I have emails to prove exactly what went on. I’ll probably never expose them but the conversations that went on about how people like Dannii were being played for the ratings were insane.

She was beaten emotionally to a pulp one year and to be frank I’m surprised she didn’t have a full-blown mental breakdown behind the scenes. She may well have. A recent interview she did gave a little bit of an insight into the torture she suffered. I mean, she ran back to Australia to escape the UK for close to a decade. The signs were there.

Then with ITV the final nail in the coffin for me was obviously the Caroline Flack debacle when she was tossed aside like trash following a private life situation that was tabloid fodder and a police situation with her boyfriend. What ITV did caused so much anguish in the final months of Caroline’s life. They chucked her out on her backside from hosting Love Island. If you ask me, it was a catalyst to what ended up happening. Such a fuck up on their part. Things might have been so very different if the channel had supported their star and in turn the police hadn’t pursued a silly scenario with the press putting it all on the front pages for weeks. But hey, that’s a whole ‘nother conversation.

Back then – and probably now - the vibe of ITV felt sinister and twisted to me. Ratings were all they cared about. They picked people up, used them and ditched them for people’s amusement in the media. Sure, there have been a lot of steps to improve the way they treat individuals in 2024 with duty of care rules etc. Yada yada. But back in the noughties it was all about people being pitted against each other, shredded by judges for amusement on screen and generally encouraging humiliation delivered a regular ratings winner for the channel. It was a shitty rollercoaster to ride each week as a writer.

Holding my hands up, I obviously played a part in this writing all the shite I was being pedaled by the PR folks or from the judges and contestants themselves. Everyone was to blame with the way people on that show were being treated in the media. Another thing you must consider is the fact the ratings were HUGE. Up to 20 million a Saturday and Sunday night for X Factor. The continual drama ensured these shows remained the biggest shows on the box each week.

Viewers didn’t seem to consider the fact there was so much bullying, dismay and drama going on behind the scenes. They just loved the drama of it all. Sharon bitching at a tearful Dannii. Ratings winner. Contestant with a wild sob story. Ratings winner. Horrific judgements from Cowell. Ratings winner. Ding ding, jackpot on every level for ITV. The public lapped it up.

It troubles me looking back at how the cogs of that machine turned back then. In some ways I doubt many of the people involved in the X Factor and ITV machine even realise how negatively they were controlling the narrative. But they were. We all were – I can admit it. Like many pieces of the puzzle in this newsletter, so many have neglected to accept any responsibility over how we played the pawns in the ITV bubble. It wasn’t even given a second thought.

I was thrilled when X Factor was cancelled. Good riddance to bad vibes. It did so much to incite hate into our society and ultimately the way we live. It wasn’t just an entertainment show. It ended up being a neggy vibe. Pitting people against each other in every way possible. The equivalent of The Running Man for a noughties generation. Who was going to be given the chop first. Who was going to be crushed. Who was tossed out with the trash.

I mean, ITV still appear to think shows like Love Island still have a space in our society. Wrong. The only show that feels genuine to me is The Masked Singer which has injected some much-needed positivity into our lives.

Then there’s shows like Loose Women, This Morning and even Lorraine, that now have a much more positive well-balanced outlook on life these days. Some of their “real life” stories are total shite still and all about click baiting for the Mail Online. It pretty much always works. And that’s before you even look at the ENDLESS Holly and Schofe articles. Is there anything more laborious? It feels like it’s permanently a slow news day with tale after tale about Holly and Schofe STILL hitting the front pages in October 2024.

Let’s just hope shows like X Factor never make a return. It was a moment in time, for sure. And hey, it had a few great moments. Leona, Alexandra with Beyonce, Cardle, 1D, Little Mix…

But trust me, behind the scenes it wasn’t pretty. It was little more than a viper’s nest.

What are your thoughts? Let me know below!