The Crying Game

The X-Factor isn't really my cup of tea. I'm more of a Strictly man, mainly because SCD reminds me of celebs lumping around the Morecambe and Wise set and XF has all of the amateur charmlessness of Opportunity Knocks. I hate 'human interest' – I don't want to see 17 year olds weeping because Simon Cowell has said they aren't Celine Dion.

This series of XF is a two horse race (and I'm not talking about creepy John and Edward, and their incest-tastic version of Britney's Oops, I Did It Again) - Jamie, the cute guy with the highly rufflable afro and super-flexible voice, and Stacie, who is Catherine Tate doing an exaggerated impression of Peggy from Hi-De-Hi! when she talks, and is Jennifer Rush when she sings. The others are a bunch of feeble-voiced twits we have to slowly eliminate week on week, and patiently sit through them butchering Sinatra and ABBA. Poor Rachel, in the sing-off for the last two weeks isn't the weakest singer by any stretch, but she looks odd. uncomfortable up there – last week dressed as post-assault Rhianna, this week as Denise from Five Star.

It has completely put me off Cheryl Cole. Last series made her career as the woman that middle-class ladies the country over could claim was their 'girl crush' (a fucking annoying sentiment that inevitably leads to the let's-treat-gays-as-exotic-tourism of Katy Perry's truly appalling I Kissed a Girl and I Liked It). This series has undone it at a stroke. The papers might be out for Minogue after her Danyl that-came-out-wrong moment, but Cole's waterworks have been as tedious and stage-managed as Brendan Cole's insincere attempt at indignation on Strictly for his ancing partner Jo Wood being rightly criticised as shit.

Last week Robbie shouted his way through his new single and did his Freddie Starr dance. This week the newly-scary Whitney spent most of her song doing her dress back up and not singing. I've not properly adjusted from seeing her as the dull Cliff Richard of R&B, but these days she looks like a woman who could do anything, apart from behave well...