The beginning of the end?

Last night I hate to admit it but I watched X Factor after coming home from a very interesting Vietnamese afternoon in Edinburgh.

I've never really caught on to the concept of people wasting their money on voting on reality shows. On the very first Big Brother there were a lot of people who seemed to be complaining that they couldn't get through but were charged anyway and I thought then that this was all a bit of a con. Call it conspiracy or what you like, but I'm absolutely convinced that the producers of these kind of programmes call the shots and ultimately say who's going to win.

So it didn't surprise me at all that the two people in the bottom two of X Factor this week were two out of the three people who were destined to be in the final if you went by people who could actually sing. My 'conspiracy theory' says that if the producers create a whole thing around people not voting, then maybe people will actually be fooled into picking up the phone again and wasting money on what has already been decided.

Poor Ella was destined to go. Someone who could sing, who obviously has a future and so was expendable, as, sadly, is James Arthur, who can also sing and will also, in my opinion, have a future.

It didn't really matter who was knocked out, what mattered was that the public were so shocked they'd pick up the phone and start voting in their droves again. The powers-that-be needed to pull something out of the bag or they'd be in danger of this being the beginning of the end of reality shows in the format they're in now.

Cynical... sure I am!