The X-Factor 2011: Week 6

IT’S TIME! TO FACE! THE OLD CLIPS? Initially, I feared that the fact we were being treated to a bunch of random audition clips for the first 15 minutes of the show meant that Kitty Brucknell went on a pre-emptive rampage due to the likelihood of being eliminated tomorrow and had killed all the judges. Then I realised we would never be so lucky. And we weren’t, as it turns out the whole shebang was merely delayed because of a power failure. An unusual example of fail occuring outside the confines of the show for once.

The delayed show begins with another Dermot dance routine. I really don’t know what to make of these, but I guess they’re here to stay so I should just grin and bear it. It’s like a less awful version of the Horrendous Group Song™. Perhaps it’s Dermot’s pitch for a place on Strictly Come Dancing in case he ever gets the boot from presenting this. Anyway, he apologises for the late start, and introduces a short video to bring viewers up to speed with the latest farcical developments in this chaotic series. Frankie “decided to leave” which is code for “Frankie snorted 18 lines of Cocaine and had an epiphany wherein he realised he was an absolute bollocks with no talent and needed to go”. 

Desperate to ensure the show remains on schedule, because they’ve already put a significant deposit down for the final at Wembley Arena (and that place doesn’t come cheap), the producers had to scramble for a replacement contestant to pad the drama out for the requisite number of weeks. So they decided to bring back the four contestants eliminated in Week one. They’ve extracted dour Solja Boy Jonjo Kerr from the frontlines of the Cylon Civil War, where he valiantly holds the line against the Franco-Klingon hordes. They travelled to Planet Boring, ignoring the pleas of a desperate Sophie Habibis in favour of James “I’m so dull I don’t even have a proper surname” Michael. Then they made their way to Essex and found amazeballs half-preggers totes emosh duo Two Shoes underneath a pile of coats they’d stolen from a nightclub. Finally, they rescued the oldest-looking sixteen year-old in the universe, Kat Slater look-alike Amelia Lily from the clutches of Phil Mitchell. The video explaining this nonsense actually features Two Shoes saying “OMG SHOE REVENGE” which is possibly my favourite moment of the entire series. The most popular of these four will be chosen by public vote to return to the competition and perform at the end of tonight’s show and then face potential elimination tomorrow. Got it? No? Well, that’s okay, because it’s a foregone conclusion that Amelia Lily is going to romp home with the vote anyway.

Dermot introduces the judges and tonight’s theme, which is Sing a Song by Lady Gaga or Queen. For some reason, Kelly Rowland has decided to dress as a penguin tonight, demonstrating that her tenuous grip on reality is worsening each week. Dermot asks each of the judges which of the four acts they’d like to see return. Tulisa, Kelly and Gary unsurprisingly go for each of the acts they originally mentored. Louis, meanwhile, picks Kat Slater. Somewhere backstage Jonjo Kerr has shed a single tear. Maybe. If he wasn’t a dead-eyed sociopath who joined the army to feed his urge to kill.

First to perform is Kitty Brucknell, which means she’s going home tomorrow, alas. Kitty’s VT focuses on how she’s the biggest Lady Gaga fan in the world and absolutely cannot wait for the opportunity to perform Born this Way. Her excitement at becoming Gaga is palpable. She bounces up and down and off the walls, detailing her elaborate plans for Born This Way. Then it turns out that Misha B will be performing it instead because she knows where Kitty’s dad lives (in a shopping centre, wearing a sandwich board that says “Vote Kitty”, if this intro video is anything to go by) and has lots of friends with crowbars. Bereft at being denied the opportunity to sing her favouritest Gaga song ever, Kitty had a massive strop and decided that if she couldn’t sing it then she wasn’t going to sing any Gaga song at all, and she was going to hold her breath until she fainted and not do her homework and Misha B is a big meanie. So, Kitty has decided to sing Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now instead. From atop a chariot. Attached to four dancers dressed as... leather-clad war horses? I think the sheer lunacy of the staging for this performance actually broke my brain’s ability to interpret it. The dancers rear. They shake their heads in a horse-stylee. They approximate a canter. The level of sheer insanity on display is almost equal to the Mad Hatter’s party performance of It’s Oh So Quiet from a few weeks ago. I think they did it on purpose to bleach away all memory of Frankie. Unfortunately, the routine isn’t enough to ignore the fact that it’s a fairly weak vocal. JUDGES! Gary calls Kitty “very pretty” which is probably the closest he’s come to being aroused in about 12 years.

Is your brain still reeling from the sight of grown adults pretending to gallop about on stage as horses while a botoxed “twenty-eight” year old channelled Boadicea? Do you need the equivalent of a nice cup of tea and a sit down following a frenetic epileptic seizure brought on by a diamond bullet of sheer madness being shot into your cerebral cortex from a sniper-rifle carved from pure calcified bedlam? You’re in luck, because Craig Colton is up next! Craig’s VT is all about how hard he works and features practice and singing lessons with Gary Barlow. Does the fact that Gary was doing a lot of singing in the video make him eligible for the sing off in the next show? Here’s hoping! Craig enjoyed himself last week, when he proved he could do up-tempo by singing the ballad version of a floor filler. Therefore, he has decided to take a chance and be even more unique this week. You won’t be at all surprised then to hear that Craig’s unique spin on Lady Gaga’s Paparazzi is to completely rip off her piano-version of the song. And without Gaga manically tinkling the ivories it isn’t half as fun. Oh, maybe by “unique” he was referring to the fact that confirmed homosexualist Craig Colton has changed the lyrics from a male object of desire to female. A combination of his newfound sexual confusion and disturbingly tight trousers make this the scariest Biscuitman performance ever. I genuinely thought his considerable and quite-confined thighs were just going to explode and kill the audience. Considering the rapturous applause they give Big Bore Biscuitman, however, perhaps death is the least of what they deserve. JUDGES! Kelly Rowland informs Craig that “You just did that” and I wonder if she’s trying to steal Louis Walsh’s world title for stating the obvious. She’ll have her work cut out.

Tulisa introduces her only remaining act, Little Kandy Girl-Lash. They’re her “Little Muffins”, apparently. Though one of them is much higher in calories than all the others. The intro video is a bit all over the place. First of all it’s about the girls being sad that The Risk went. Then they’re happy because they’re the most successful girl band on the X-Factor ever, which must mean they’re going to be in the bottom two tomorrow with Kitty. Then they have a not-at-all-staged “girly night in” with Tulisa. Then several massive random dogs magically appear. Then they’re rehearsing and Pick ‘n Mix breaks down and everyone is sad and I have no idea what was going on. EDITORS? NARRATIVE STRUCTURE? SORT IT OUT! Anyway, Little Kandy Girl-Lash will be performing Gaga’s Telephone tonight. Myxomatosis takes most of the vocals actually, with the rest just backing her up. Also: Pick ‘n’ Mix is wearing her gigantic chunky neckwear that spells out LOVE yet again. Except it’s on backwards. I hope the poor girl isn’t dyslexic on top of all her other flaws. JUDGES! Gary Barlow spits into their faces and tells them they’re getting predictable and he’s sick of seeing them have fun and wishes they were miserable cunts like Janet instead.  He asks if they’re happy doing the same thing every week and they have a hilarious Little Mix huddle wherein they confer and decide that they are indeed happy doing the same thing every week. It’s almost endearing.

Wee Janet Devlin from Ireland is next. We know this because Kelly Rowland introduces Janet by mentioning Ireland, talks about Ireland several times in the intro-video, and mentions Ireland again after the song is finished. From this, I conclude that Kelly has only just learned what Ireland is in the past few days, and wants to show off the new word she learned. Please note that Kelly Rowland is wearing what appear to be several foxes, a bear pelt, eighteen mink and a couple of raccoons about her shoulders. Janet is sad in her video because she was third from bottom last week. No Janet, it is in no particular order, remember? Also, the bottom three were The Risk, Johnny and Kitty, you thicko. The theme of Janet’s VT is Let’s Get Janet Back In Her Box. To achieve this goal, she’ll be performing Queen’s Somebody to Love in an overwrought, wrist-slittingly depressing style. Seriously, it’s so scaled back and slowed down that listening to it practically propels me back in time to a period when Frankie was still in the competition, so I’m forced to fast forward for my own well-being. It’s just so, so dull. Surprise elimination tomorrow? Maybe. Then again, look how far the Norrie Iron vote got Eoghan Quigg a few years back... *shudder* JUDGES! Louis Walsh is incredibly enthusiastic about Janet but we won’t pay any attention to that because it’s all lies. Tulisa says that she feels that Janet is very one dimensional. This is the same Tulisa who last week chastened Janet for trying something different and told her to get back into her box and don’t dare come out. Dermot rightly points this out. The judges ignore this sage fact. Dermot basically asks Janet how she feels about being pigeon-holed and she says she just needs to find a middle ground between sad and happy. Sappy! No Janet! Come out and sing Du Hast next week! You know you want to.

From Janet feeling uncomfortable in her box, to sparkly gay Marcus finally finding his. His VT is concerned with how much fun he had last week and how that’s the kind of music he wants to be making. To this end, he comes out and performs Another One Bites the Dust with the exact same dance routine and in the exact same style as Reet Petite last week. It just does not work. This song, in this style is just completely jarring and wrong. And just when it seems like it can’t get any worse, the performance ends with Marcus and his dancers blowing sparkle fag glitter dust into the camera. The judges uniformly decree that doing something identical to last week was the wrong move. “Tactical Critique”, cries Barlow, which assumes that the judges on this show have about 100 more IQ points than they actually have.

Misha B is up next and there are no surprises for guessing what she’s performing seeing as they let it slip at the start of the show when Kitty had her strop. Her VT depicts her happiness at not being in the bottom two last week, which gave her the confidence to start bullying again following a rough week. Shots of Misha thumping a pregnant woman in the womb, giving schoolchildren wedgies and reviewing footage of the London riots while shouting “That’s me!” and “There I am again!”. The video assures us that Manchester is supporting Misha. Because she’ll kick the entire city in the face if they don’t. This isn’t Misha’s best performance, and she loses further points because she isn’t even dressed as a rhinoceros or a papier maché newspaper queen to distract from the limp vocals. If Misha ever finds this blog I’m going to get such a bullying. JUDGES! Louis actually says that Misha reminds him of a little Chaka Kahn. Or possibly Jackie Chan. It’s difficult to tell. He’s just bloody doing it on purpose now, isn’t he? Gary applauds Misha for her work ethic because she’s always had at work unlike other contestants who sleep all the time. If I were the other contestants, I’d be very creeped out by the possibility that Gary Barlow may have just admitted to watching me sleep.

We take a quick break from the performances for the biggest foregone conclusion in the history of foregone conclusions as Dermot announces who the returning competitor will be! He tries to strangle some drama out of the moment before announcing to no one’s surprise that Kat Slater is back in the competition. After a quick intro video to remind us who she is, Kat steps on-stage wearing very little to perform her rendition of The Show Must Go On. That’s such a clever song choice given the circumstances that I refuse to believe it’s deliberate. There’s no way the producers or Kelly Rowland or whoever gave Amelia that song was witty enough to be so meta. Considering that Kat barely had two days to pack her bags and leave Albert Square, learn the song and rehearse it, she does a pretty amazing job. It’s quite an uneven trade when you consider she’s replacing Frankie. Substituting Frankie with a wind-up drumming monkey toy would have been a sufficient exchange, but here we are being spoilt rotten with someone who might actually be able to sing. JUDGES! Are enthusiastic one and all because they’re hardly going to fucking well criticise the first person in the history of this contest to be voted IN to the show by the public, are they? Kelly explains how it tore her heart out to get rid of Kat and she’s so glad to have her back. Kat grins evilly and you know she’s totally going to get bullying advice from Misha B and make Kelly’s life hell.

Join me tomorrow when the producers decide to bring back The Risk with an all new lineup voted in by the public. Meanwhile, Amelia decides to burn down The Queen Vic and blame it on Kelly by leaving her weave at the scene of the crime.