Monday We shall tell you a secret. There is no John and there is no Edward. Actually, there are 12 Jedward bodies and 8 Jedward heads. The bodies are piled up in a corner of our room in the X-Factor house in Golders Green. The heads hang upside down in a cupboard. They need to be upside down to preserve our very tall hair. If the hair were to sag, the audience might see our aerials.
“Jedward?” says Louis Walsh, barging in.
“Yes?” say our heads, in chorus. Although we were all made in a special stage school factory in Ireland, each of our voices manages to say it in a slightly different time at a slightly different pitch. Such is the power of the Jedward.
“I need a volunteer,” says Louis. “We’re having trouble with Dannii Minogue. She’s still causing problems, so we need to give her a scare.”
Various bodies put up their hands, but Louis is only after a head. “You’ll do,” he says, picking up Head 3. Then he says he’s going to cover the head in ketchup, and leave it in her bed. That should keep her in line.
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Tuesday Dannii is angry because Simon Cowell kept us in The X-Factor and voted out one of her acts, Lucie Jones. Everybody says that Lucie is better than us at singing. Still, she never had our respect. There is only one of her. She has very flat hair. Her head doesn’t even come off. She can’t even spell “Lucy”.
There used to be nine heads, but Head 6 got lost just before we were due to go onstage and do our performance of Baby One More Time. We nearly did it half-headless, what with it being Hallowe’en, but they sent a runner just in time to fetch a spare.
Louis is very pleased with us, particularly since Simon came on board. Everybody says we’re the culmination of everything he’s been trying to do for his whole career. When Westlife all came out different, says the runner, apparently he sulked for almost six months.
Wednesday The runner comes back with the head that Louis put in Dannii’s bed, and the other one that went missing on Hallowe’en. They’re both in a duffel bag.
Head 6 has spent the past fortnight down the back of a radiator and is feeling quite shaken. Head 3 is pretty chirpy, though. He says that Dannii didn’t even notice him. Eventually he rolled out of the bed, landed the right way up on a 2ft high bedside table, and decided he might as well wake her up. She didn’t have her contact lenses in so at first she thought he was her sister Kylie, dropping by on a surprise visit.
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Thursday The Prime Minister has sent us a note to apologise for telling a Manchester radio station that we couldn’t sing.
“This is a very big deal,” says Louis, who is thrilled. “The Prime Minister! You guys should be thrilled. I’m going to have this framed and stick it up on the wall.”
We don’t want to spoil his mood, but none of us really thinks he ought to be so excited. It actually seems to be for somebody called “Jodward”.
Friday Major rehearsals today. Tomorrow night, we’re putting on a performance of Bohemian Rhapsody. You know that bit at the end where it’s all black and you just see the faces singing about Galileo? We’re going to do that.
Anyway, Heads 6 through to 9 are each being painstakingly balanced on to their own blacked-out shelf in a diamond pattern when Simon Cowell comes in.
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“You boys!” he says, rubbing his hands together. “We’re going to make a lot of money out of you.” He’s thinking TV presenting, he says, and chat shows, and panto, or possibly a couple of roles in Hollyoaks. Maybe even a fitness video.
“Although for that,” he points out, “we’d have to stick you on to one of the spare bodies we’ve got left over from when we made Cheryl Cole.”
*according to Hugo Rifkind