World of Big Brother Blog

Now that the show is over I thought I would give my opinions of this years series as a whole.

Even though The X Factor and Pop Idol before it have been running in the UK for almost 10 years, this is the first edition that I have watched. I’m not really sure why I never watched it before, I guess I just had other things to do or watch on a Saturday evening.

But this year, I found myself without internet access at home and nothing else to watch at that time so I thought I’d give it a go and see what all the fuss was about.

Having not watched previous editions, I have nothing to compare it to so I don’t know if this was better, worse or just average. On the whole I did enjoy the show, although I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it is my favourite show, nor will I be peeing my pants with excitement a few days before next years launch show. But it entertained me and filled a gap in my weekend and I will be watching again next year.

I liked that my favourite contestants seemed to change from week to week. I’m used to watching shows like Big Brother where I form opinions of Housemates that rarely change after the first week. But with this show, I guess because I’m judging on performances each week rather than someones personality that doesn’t really change. As people can put in good or bad performances so my opinion changes.

In the early weeks of the live shows I liked Lloyd, Lucie and John/Edward. It wasn’t until Joe sang Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me in week 7 that I thought wow, I really like this guy. After that he was the one I wanted to win. Although I thought Olly put in a great performance in the final and would also have been a worthy winner.

Simon Cowell
As far as the format of the show, I think the show suffers from the dominance of Simon Cowell. He is an executive producer and also a judge/mentor. There seems to me to be a big conflict of interest in his 2 roles from the show and I would like to see him step down from one of the roles. An example of this are that he made it clear during the audition process that the category that he really wanted was the over 25s, and surprise surprise, that was the category that he got.

Deadlock
The biggest problem with the format is the even number of judges. Having 4 judges means that so often the judges are tied 2-2 with their voting. Out of the 6 votes when there were 4 judges present, 5 out of the 6 ended at 2-2 and deadlock. What happens at deadlock is that it goes back to the earlier public vote and the lowest placed is eliminated. However, the problem with this is that the public vote is on the previous days performance as the voting lines closed before the sing-off, this made the sing-off a complete waste of time almost every week. A better way of doing it is to have the voting open for 2 or 3 minutes after the sing off and have the public as a 5th judge.

Percentages

http://worldofbigbrother.com/Talent/XFactor/UK/6/pics/Voting1.jpg
http://worldofbigbrother.com/Talent/XFactor/UK/6/pics/Voting2.jpg

After the final the percentages were released for every public vote. If you click on the links above you can see the 2 graphics.

The early public favourite was Danyl who won the vote in week 1 withover 27%, twice as many as Stacey who came second. However in week 2 Danyl had slipped down to 7th place and it was Stacey who won the vote, but very little separated the top 4.

By week 3 Danyl had slipped to 9th place andwas in the bottom 2. Amazingly Rachel won the vote even though she had been bottom 2 for the previous weeks. In week 4 it swung round again with Rachel going from first to last and Danyl going from last to first.

Danylwon the vote again in week 5, but each week Joe was slowly increasing his vote, coming second this week. Week 6 went to Stacey andthen came week 7. This was the week that Joe turned it around his performance of Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me won over the public and he got 34% – twice as many votes as Stacey. He never lost another public vote. Week 7 was the only week of the competition that the bottom place act wasn’t eliminated. John and Edward were eliminated by the judges vote. Had it gone to deadlock Olly would have been the one to leave.

Joe won week 8 with 37% and easily won week 9 with 42%. This was the week where 4 remained and Danyl was eliminated. The vote was extremely close with less than 1% separating Danyl in last place and Olly in 2nd place.

Down to the final 3 and Joe hit 52%, Olly got 28% meaning Stacey was eliminated 1 day before the final with 20%.

In the final Joe was the clear winner with 61.3% to Olly’s 38.7%.

The only question left to be answered is will Joe’s single be Christmas number 1 on the singles chart. All 5 previous winners singles have reached number 1, will Joe keep this record going? We will find out on Sunday.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 11:49 am and is filed under Graham's Blog, X Factor (The), X Factor 6 UK. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.