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breakdown, gazing up its own arse and wondering whether the turds lodged within are real or fake. At last week’s Edinburgh TV festival, there was much agonised discussion about a ‘crisis of trust’, and a fault line developing in the ‘relationship with the viewer’. Since The X Factor got swept up into the ongoing fakery argument too, it seems audience figures are largely unaffected by the ‘crisis’, provided youserve up enough desperate losers for them to point and laugh at.
    But since ITV are, hilariously, promising ‘zero tolerance’ for any and all forms of telly fakery, it’s worth asking just how real the show is. Early press reports, for instance, suggested the first episode included footage in which Cowell pulled an executive producer aside to discuss the return of Louis Walsh, which turned out to be a ‘pick-up shot’ rather than an actual record of events. Unless I blinked for an unusually long time, it had been removed from the broadcast version. But why? Walsh’s return seemed so thumpingly false anyway, the whole thing might as well have been an animated sequence. And no one gives a shit, because this is only wrestling, and not a real sport.
    Yet despite this – despite NO ONE GIVING A SHIT – Cowell said, ‘What you see is what happened. We don’t try to censor this show. I’ve always said we will allow viewers to look through the keyhole and that’s what we do. It’s raw and we don’t censor. It’s not a sanitised, make-believe show.’
    I had no idea The X Factor was part of the Dogme 95 movement, but there you go. Since it’s year zero for authenticity, I look forward to watching the following sequences over the coming weeks:
    1. The scene where the producers ‘pre-audition’ the hopefuls, filtering out the merely ‘average’ ones and selecting the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ones to be seen by the celebrity judging panel.
    2. One of those post-audition sequences in which a singer is shown returning to their proletarian workplace, where their colleagues are nervously lined up ‘awaiting the news’, except instead of shouting ‘I got through!’ and everyone running in to give them a hug, they mumble ‘I failed’ and everyone weeps and wails and rubs it in their face with dismay.
    3. Currently, only the good singers are allowed to have tragic back stories. I’m waiting to see one of the comically ugly or dreadful singers recount a heart-rending tale about how their dad died, or their best friend died, or they got leukaemia of the voice and barely pulled through, before walking into the audition room to be humiliated by the sniggering judges. The show must have amassed a staggering archive containing hour upon hour of boss-eyed fatsos with voiceslike harpooned gnus blubbering into camera about how they’re entering The X Factor in honour of a dead relative – none of which makes it into the edit because it doesn’t suit the ‘story’.
    Well, come on. Apparently this isn’t a ‘sanitised, make-believe show’. So let’s see it. Cough up.
The madding crowd [15 September 2007]
    It’s an ongoing, fast-moving story, and events may have drastically changed between the time of writing (Tuesday morning) and the time you read this (Now O’Clock), but nevertheless, I’ve got to discuss the rolling news coverage of the Madeleine McCann case, because I’ve scarcely seen anything else.
    Here is a story that’s been granted saturation coverage throughout the slow ‘silly season’ despite, for most of that time, a lack of any concrete developments. For the news channels, it’s perfect: an emotive, unfolding, open-ended human interest drama with regular interest ‘spikes’ each time a celebrity endorses the search campaign or a suspect is named. The news-slingers thrive on these spikes, like junkies clawing at crack rocks.
    When Robert Murat popped up, Sky News could scarcely contain their glee. Breaking news! Breaking, breaking news! Here’s video of the man police are