Me And The Monorail

This is merely an issue of a previous  attempt at public announcements/blogging.

In the confines of my Studio of Terrible Ideas (my bedroom) and in my immediate realm I'm largely free from exposure to what is essentially the worst excesses of society. The circle of company I keep and our comparitively zany discourse thankfully limits this too. It's no secret that TV is shit these days, and the majority of films are just mediocre re-hashes of old plots and ideas.

With the zap of a button and a steadfast refusal to enter a cinema like I said, I can limit my exposure. Nonetheless, the X Factor is simply the vilest and thought-inhibiting piece of television that has ever existed. Not just for it's vapid entertainment value, it's a jarring metaphor for everything wrong with modern culture.

On the actual content of the show itself, a natural cynic like me gets barely a flutter of enjoyment watching delusional, personality-free idiots with a microphone and a sob story massacre Katy Perry and Pink covers to  jeering and extremely public humiliation. What's really quite alarming is that these people are pre-selected by the production to go out and embarrass themselves wrapped up in the pretty package of "giving it a go," completely unaware or unfazed by the fact that they are on the show for just that.

Any human being alive that can possess both the misguided confidence in their singing "talent" and the impertinent self-worth contained in their god-given right to be rich and famous should never be allowed anywhere near the public eye. In fact, I might go as far as to seal these people in a classroom with dusty books and grimy windows and drum into them for eternity their irrelevance and unremarkability.

But I hear you say "Felix! WTF? How can you slag X Factor for that when you watch Big Brother." Big Brother is by no means respectable television but at least it doesn't even try to hide the fact that it subjects its vacuous participants to comic social torture and promises nothing but an after-life of mediocrity and obscurity. Even the talented and successful X Factor contestants can look forward to putting their voice to chart-topping hits like "I Am The Lizard Queen" and "I Desperately Want To Have Sexual Intercourse And Romantic Relations With *object of my dreams* So I Will Convert That Emotion Into 3 Minutes Of Synthesised Beats And Melodies"

The real horror is the underlying aspects of the X Factor. The judges themselves, caked in make-up and body-flattering suits and dresses are nothing more than a vapid, mutated-Fab Four gaggle of idiots. Gary Barlow has the cocksure talented  and experienced air and rightfully puts terrible people and Louis Walsh in his place but unfortunately, I cannot stress enough just what a horrific human being Gary Barlow is. He is quite simply Hitler multiplied by the Viet Cong multiplied by Harold Shipman in association with Margaret Thatcher. Louis Walsh is an older man that wears shirts with jeans, so is automatically a pedophile. In a decisive victory against 50+ years of struggle for  feminine equality and status the women serve the same purpose as oil paintings, attractive to look at and discarded when too old and too out of date.

Every sound, flash, whoosh and stir is over-produced to hell which sortof makes the entire process of watching these kinds of shows a bit like staring at a strobe light. Why is this a bad thing? Becuase it's subtley assuming and promoting the notion that we are an audience of ignorant and illiterate twits who need spoonfed what  and when to feel and think. We like simple, cheap, stupid entertainment with no subversity, subtext or anything remotely thought-provoking or complicated to trouble our calm minds. X Factor and its ilk are sickeningly safe and unoffensive to appeal to the moral guardians and reactionary Luddite generation and the highest and lowest degrees of human ignorance.

And yes, I've been giving X Factor the stick when other "talent" competition shows promote the same values. Strictly Come Dancing and Dancing On Ice assume that we are desperate to watch celebrities attempt to dance, and their glossy, eye-straining bright sets and flashing lights reduce the entire art of watching television to simply pointing and looking at pretty colours and sounds.

Then again, X factor's viewership bafflingly rises every year, and the drama and sorrow is played with an army of violins to the highest degree. Of course as people we cannot perceive understand emotion and context itself, it has to be spelled out, vamped up and thrust in our faces until we understand it.

These kind of TV shows stifle and demonise intelligence and free thought and the ability to question the world. Shining example - Red Vs. Black. The crux of the gameshow format is to test the intelligence, atheltic prowess and general hard-work and talent of contestants and its pathos per se is those qualities paying off in a victory for the sometimes deserving winner.

Red Vs. Black reduces even this to the convoluted flip of a coin, promising people riches and wonder and all these fucking imbeciles have to do is succeed a 50/50 choice a number of times. And if that's not enough - the audience is treated to blurbs about the participants' wishes with the money they'll never have and their spiel involving why they deserve it - "My Boyfriend Was Murdered By A Rowdy Gang Of Asian Youths, Chopped Up And Served Up In Kebabs Across The Merseyside Area But £1,000,000 And A Career In Television Should Settle My Grief Pretty Fast Cheers Thanks."

TV aims to inform but sadly, we are slowly but surely being spoonfed the ideals of no thought, no action and no intelligence. Anyone that watches them and enjoys them might as well surgically remove their frontal lobes and cook them into a kebab from the Merseyside area.