The X Factor
ITV, Saturday/Sunday
*
Crimes of Passion
BBC Four, Saturday
**
The Simon Cowell Chest Estuary is back — the dark waves of his body hair lapping against the deep-V land mass of his crisp white shirt, his face flapping slightly in the wind as he introduced the new series of The X Factor — the 11th — from on board a helicopter. Fellow judge Cheryl Cole (sorry — Cheryl Fernandez-Versini) mounted a motorbike in leathers. Mel B a jet. Louis Walsh hopped on to the same old bandwagon of being the series fall guy. The signal at the start of Saturday’s show was simple: excess, excess, excess — and the first two episodes were soaked in it.
Cowell’s singing show prides itself on creating the biggest-selling stars — Leona Lewis, One Direction — but, boy, the circus we endure to get there has reached full pelt. There was a sequence that would have even made Alice in her Wonderland feel out-tripped, as a woman with a karaoke machine sent her mum to tempt the judges with Chinese food, an oversized cake and a happy-face balloon.
An older lady stripped to little but leotard and wig for a Tina Turner take-off (google Psychoville and Tina Turner and see how it compares). A girl duo was so impossibly kooky that you could tell they would be in before they even opened their mouths (they opened them a lot).
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Even the good acts seem so tooled up for the task, winking at the judges, playing the system in a way that seems very far away from the innocence of the early series — say when Leona Lewis took to the stage barefoot, not because 1,000 contestants had done it before, but just because. Now it’s hard to look at another Harry Styles haircut without seeing the contrivances nesting inside it.
I never thought I’d say this, but the rare highlight for me came from Mel B who, in response to the contestants going doolally for Cheryl’s beauty, countered drily: “What am I, chopped liver?” Zig-a-zig-ah.
It could be that my funny bones are exhausted from a month spent watching comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe, but I had an almost complete sense of humour failure here. “Shut up and dance,” said Cowell at one point and I agreed with his instinct. Only in my head it translated as: “When does Strictly start?”
We’ve all heard of Sweden’s excellent social welfare system, but in the 1950s was there also a state-sponsored scheme to put aphrodisiacs in the water? As the latest Swedish import Crimes of Passion (adapted from the novels of Maria Lang) got under way, this was certainly a case of style and snogs over substance.
A bunch of exquisitely groomed young things got together for a midsummer party on an isolated island and, yes, the literary references flew (it was midsummer and our heroine was called Puck) as a murder mystery began. But this was really all about the lust. Everyone was sexing everyone else and when we weren’t watching people smooching and smoking together we were watching redundant recaps of people smooching and smoking. It all cancelled itself out into a bit of a nothing.
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There are another five feature-length parts. Let’s hope the next one has been laced with more believability and possibly some bromide.