Rod Liddell

I was not writing anything today no news event really caught my eye, but as I was perusing the papers I came across this piece by Rod Liddell and enjoyed it so much that I thought I would offer anybody who came to view my effort today to his piece, its not just laziness on my part, its because Rods piece is a bloody good read. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/rod_liddle/article6973998.ece

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In its review of the decade broadcast on New Year’s Eve, the BBC cut from footage of those planes smashing into the Twin Towers to a man called Will Young winning the original incarnation of The X Factor — as if these two crimes against humanity were equal in their devastation.

They are not, of course, although there are similarities. The mastermind behind each atrocity remains at large, planning new miseries for the rest of us. Both have become so familiar to us through their evil intent that they have made cameo appearances in popular American cartoon programmes — Osama Bin Laden in South Park and Simon Cowell in The Simpsons. Bin Laden cannot be found while Cowell cannot be avoided.

Meanwhile the adolescent protégés of these two men enjoy their exceptionally brief moments in the limelight before vanishing into the ether — in the case of Osama’s multitudes, quite literally so. There is no proven link between Bin Laden and Cowell, although Cowell once described the Saudi as “a guy with just bags of talent, and a real edginess, I really like what I’m seeing”. Actually he didn’t — I made that up.

Simon Cowell is not a mass murderer, which is an important caveat. People do not die as a direct consequence of The X Factor — except in a few unverified cases of viewers witnessing their will to live exiting through the tops of their skulls as some off-key warbling nonentity makes a George Michael song even more emetic than it was in the first place and being congratulated on so doing by thick, doe-eyed, over-emoting panellists who themselves are possessed of not even a soupçon of talent.

And it’s here that there is something genuinely defining about The X Factor — in the elevation of suffocating mediocrity, the superficial, the banal and in the incontinent, demented shrieking of the studio audience, and — when the hopeless winner is announced, the statements of congratulation from No 10 and the opposition.

When the Geordie Joe McElderry won last year’s contest, they cut to a vast street party in his home town of South Shields where the idiotic mayor and his wife were dancing a jig, the sorts of scenes Britain once witnessed only on occasions such as VE Day.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------  Told you it was a good read.