They can still do it, then. This weekend saw Bella expertly filleted, then the judges neatly orchestrated to minimise the embarrassment of dragging Acacia and Aaliyah through yet another singoff – Louis got to look willing to take tough decisions, and Ayda turned on the acting skills to work herself into a state of deadlock-justifying indecision that did for Shan. As longtime commenter Alan noted, “we’ve got our X Factor back”.
Like Gio last week, both Shan and Bella fell victim to the imperative of making sure Robbie has a reason to come back from South America. Having Bella’s similar performance immediately follow Acacia and Aaliyah, with the twosome fulsomely praised and Bella hung out to dry, suggested that producers had seen from the app an overlap in their demographics and were trying to shift all that support Acacia and Aaliyah’s way this week.
Brendan had looked like he was also in the firing line in Saturday’s show, with a VT that showed the Irishman being taken to watch, er, an England football match – he told Louis he’d never been to a match in Ireland, suggesting that the experience was doubly wasted on him. The impression, accentuated by Wayne Rooney’s later appearance in Anthony’s VT, was that Brendan had been dragged along to something Louis and Anthony wanted to do because he’s the lowest-status member of that group.
Not that producers will have been surprised to lose Shan, judging by the fact that they chose to show a wide-angle shot of all the empty pews on her return to church. It’s not always easy for producers to whip up a crowd at short notice for these VTs, as I saw first-hand when I went along to the filming of an Emily Middlemas VT at my local pub a couple of years ago – but on that occasion producers took care to choose camera angles that disguised the thin attendance as best they could.
So if producers can still orchestrate an assassination when they want to, why has there been such a sense of drift this series? We can only assume that “save Robbie’s blushes” is the first clear instruction they’ve been given to execute. In contrast to last year, when the singer-songwriter mission statement was established in the first audition, there doesn’t seem to have been any big-picture goal this year. Simon has often given the impression of not being fully engaged, and on Saturday looked like a startled deer when Dermot threw to him to introduce Scarlett and then again with Shan.
In this unusual situation of a relatively open playing field, it’s Dalton who has taken the series by the scruff of the neck and he tightened his grip on Saturday with a version of ‘Listen’ that got a huge reaction in the studio and has garnered three times the YouTube views of anyone else. It would be a surprise if Dalton isn’t also bossing the vote, and we see no sign so far that producers are anything other than relaxed about the prospect of him winning.
There’s now only one more weekend before the final. Might they at this point be tempted to shoot for one-act-per-mentor? Danny’s pimp slot on Saturday certainly suggested they were keen to keep Ayda in the game at least for another week, and Anthony got some bad press in the Sunday papers – it wasn’t in The Sun, which Cowell’s damage limitation interview last week suggested is still the mouthpiece of choice, but it’s still the kind of story we assume the show’s press office could lean on the paper not to run if they wanted to.
Alternatively, producers might take the view that it’s job done now, and it doesn’t much matter if Robbie and/or Ayda are neutral judges just for the final weekend. As ever, let us know your continued thoughts below.
As for Gio, being first on, with fire in the staging, then memoryholed by Dalton, was always going to put him in danger – but it makes little sense for them to have wanted to lose Gio at this stage, given his ability to sing and put on a show. We continue to suspect that sheer laziness is the best explanation for everything we’re seeing this season:
Latest Comments
No comments.