The 13th series of The X Factor finishes this weekend with a grandstand finale that will feature performances from The Weeknd, Kylie Minogue, Little Mix and Madness, but with plummeting ratings year-on-year, the question many TV fans are asking is: does anyone still care about the singing competition?
This year it was announced that the show would remain on our screens until at least 2019, after ITV signed a new three-year deal with Simon Cowell. ITV’s director of television, Kevin Lygo, said The X Factor, along with Britain’s Got Talent, were defining programmes for the broadcaster and continued to be “amongst the most popular and hugely entertaining formats on television”.
Saturday’s finalists are 23-year-old Matt Terry, 29-year-old Finnish national Saara Aalto, and boy band 5 After Midnight, each of whom will be performing duets with established pop stars. Unlike in previous years when the finalists covered existing hits as their prospective first single, each act will have their own track written especially for them by Ed Sheeran, with all profits going to charity.
But despite this and other overhauls by Simon Cowell, it has not been a vintage year for The X Factor. When the show returned in August, complete with judges Louis Walsh, Sharon Osbourne and Nicole Scherzinger, as well as host Dermot O’Leary, it had its lowest launch ratings in 10 years, and throughout the series it has lost out in the ratings battle to its BBC rival Strictly Come Dancing.
The recent episode of Strictly in which one of its most popular contestants, the former shadow chancellor Ed Balls, was eliminated had an average of 10.6 million viewers and a peak of 11.4 million. That weekend The X Factor was watched by 6.1 million viewers, peaking at 7.6 million. Meanwhile, Planet Earth II has secured a larger proportion of the sought-after 16- to 34-year-old audience than Cowell’s talent show.
According to Annette Hill, professor of media and communication at Lund University, this is a sign of audiences’ growing fatigue with the X Factor format.
“To begin with, talent shows offered this wonderful story of success, but there was still an element of authenticity in the way that they auditioned and the way the contestants would sing to us or dance to us. We were following their performance and their true selves through the classic journey of the show,” Hill said.
“The problem was that it really quickly became quite illegitimate and faux, because everything became over the top. It’s what I call the moment’s moment: big tears, big tantrums, elements of the reality talent show where it becomes a huge spectacle of excess and emotion without the authenticity running behind it. So viewers start to question whether voting matters in these shows, and are aware that they’re watching something that’s so highly produced, particularly The X Factor.”
Hill’s book, Reality TV, draws on research conducted over the last 15 years with 15,000 people, most of whom said they were bored of talent shows. “Around 2008 to 2010 is when the ratings started to flatline for many talent shows, and certain shows that I really liked, like Got to Dance on Sky, were axed,” she said. “The main talent shows had to rejuvenate themselves. Strictly did it really well with good casting and presentation, and that invitation to a party that the show does so well. It very cleverly handled the format fatigue by always keeping a real warmth to it.”
Since it debuted in 2004, The X Factor has spawned major chart successes such as One Direction and Leona Lewis, but last year’s winner, Louisa Johnson, who was the show’s youngest ever champion, had the lowest chart entry for a winner’s single to date.
To try to boost ratings, The X Factor has in part relied on novelty acts who simultaneously thrill and enrage viewers. This year it was the rapper Honey G, who was described by Lily Allen as “so wrong on so many levels”, and who until recently was kept in the competition by Cowell, leading to a slew of criticism on social media by viewers who criticised the show as “a fix”.
Lisa McGarry, editor of UnrealityTV.com, said: “I feel a little disloyal in saying this, considering how attached I have become to The X Factor over the years, but perhaps it is time for it to stop.
“I no longer get excited as summer closes and the ITV extravaganza approaches. The constant format changes reek of desperation and although I have become more, not less, fond of Simon Cowell, I fear he has taken this talent vehicle as far as it can go. There is not a sob story we haven’t heard, nor an Adele tune that has not been murdered.”
ITV said TheX Factor was still averaging nearly 8 million viewers and a 31% share of viewing each week. The highest audience it has attracted this series was 10 million. The show also averages a 46% share of 16-34s, compared to Strictly’s 31%. Fifty-six per cent of Strictly’s audience were over 55, ITV pointed out.
Which is why not everyone is keen to write The X Factor’s eulogy just yet. Ben Preston, editor of the Radio Times, said he believed rumours of the show’s death had been greatly exaggerated.
“The X Factor is a television blockbuster,” he said. “A few years ago, during the glory days of Jedward, everybody wanted to talk about the show, everybody was watching it, and the politicians were going around using it as a way of ingratiating themselves on the doorsteps of their constituents. Those big reality shows that people watch in their millions have their moments in the sun – for Bake Off it was the year of Nadiya; arguably for Strictly, which certainly is in brilliant health at the moment, this has been the year of Ed Balls – everyone you met had to have an opinion about Ed’s Gangnam Style or foxtrot.
“And so The X Factor isn’t being talked about now as it was in its heyday, but most television producers would kill for its audience and kill for the contracts they’ve signed with ITV. It’s going to be with us for a long while yet.”