2 hours ago, Dobbo said:

Yeah would suck now in this day and age. What made it such engrossing TV is, as damming as it is to admit now, all the stuff you wouldn't get away with today.

Exactly!! It was super exploitative and mean. They can't be bringing it back, surely??

29 minutes ago, Summer FRUITS!!!!! said:

Exactly!! It was super exploitative and mean. They can't be bringing it back, surely??

I mean, other shows that were part of that somewhat toxic 2000s landscape have returned. Big Brother and The Weakest Link to name a few. What's stopping them making The X Factor work, if they really thought about it?

What they really need is people in charge who actually understand the essence of the format.

The Weakest Link that weren't toxic.

7 minutes ago, Mack. said:

The Weakest Link that weren't toxic.

It's not directly comparable to The X Factor for a number of reasons, but that does get grouped in with these conversations of how much "meaner" telly was in the mid 2000s. That's broadly the point I was making.

The X Factor has had its issues both on-screen and off-screen, but I think the off-screen issues need to be separated from "this was X Factor's fault" and "this was the management's fault" because they get blurred half the time.

Confirmation that TV producers are officially completely out of ideas!

X Factor was such a product of its time with the ritualistic cruelty and over the top live event TV that in order for the show to work in the late 2020s it would have to be altered so much that it would barely be the same show.

Let dead formats stay dead challenge!

The only way to make X Factor work now would be to make it as boring and soulless as The Voice, which no one would want.

I doubt the winner would be an immediate streaming success, so without getting 50,000 CDs quickly into Tesco or ASDA, it's unlikely that there would be a significant chart success and it would just be labelled a flop anyway.

Even if they did get that one Christmas hit, launching a career off the back of it would be tough.

What decent singer is going to put themselves through that?

They would probably need a Cash Prize as an incentive.

I think this speaks for the decline of prime time terrestrial TV more than anything that they're out of ideas and looking backwards.

I'm not convinced that people are really pining for it and the backstage manipulation and treatment of contestants is widely known these days, plus it's one of those shows that was just too big and of it's time that you can never replicate it. I can't see any way that it won't just be a continuation of the later series that no one cared about.

I don’t see it coming back, to be honest with you, especially with all of the stories that have happened behind the scenes. If it does come back, its viewership will possibly be at its lowest ever.

29 minutes ago, ChrisJK said:

I doubt the winner would be an immediate streaming success, so without getting 50,000 CDs quickly into Tesco or ASDA, it's unlikely that there would be a significant chart success and it would just be labelled a flop anyway.

Even if they did get that one Christmas hit, launching a career off the back of it would be tough.

What decent singer is going to put themselves through that?

They would probably need a Cash Prize as an incentive.

One thing I'd do differently is get recordings of all the performances that are actually going to get aired onto Spotify pretty soon after the show finishes airing.

At least if anyone wants to download or stream or whatever, they can. The only reason they never did that before now (in terms of making them chart eligible too) was because they wanted to "protect the integrity of the competition" but The Voice did it while they were on the BBC.

At the end of the day if the Major change isnt "BETTER AFTERCARE" theres no point

More one more stories of how badly the contestants have come to light in recent years and the fact that Lucy Spraggan had to sign a NDA after what happened to her was diabolical, heck Cher Lloyd's treatment was awful too just to name a couple

Katie Waissel, Zoe Alexander, Jedward, Misha B to name but a few.

The judges didn't care about their acts, they convinently saw them on camera.

I loved the show at its peak (and even beyond its peak) but I'm really not sure the show has a place in the current climate. It'd need to have a whole new panel, commit to being way less manufactured and manipulated, and strip the format back to basics to have any hope of working, but I think it'd still be clouded by past controversies. Sometimes it's good to leave the past in the past and move on.

2 hours ago, Dobbo said:

2 hours ago, Mack. said:

Katie Waissel, Zoe Alexander, Jedward, Misha B to name but a few.

The judges didn't care about their acts, they convinently saw them on camera.

Yup they never saw them except when cameras were rolling

Honestly, this show was everything in it's peak. I used to plan nights out based around watching this. Me and my friends would meet to watch it, pre drink and then head out after.

And when I tell you we had a FULL HOUSE for the grand return of Ms. Britney Spears, honestly the excitement was through the roof (I was a young gay living in Manchester near canal street, you can imagine how loud the screaming was)

I miss those days and the excitement and hype for the show and some of the acts and the hype packages before it.

That being said, I don't want it to come back. It will never reach those peak levels, the excitement of it all, the results shows being a mess but unmissable, the after show too (forgetting the Konnie Huq car crash year).

I can imagine it would just be the same as The Voice, completely inconsequential to the music industry and just bland television. The whole point of the show being great at the time was everything around it that made it not possible to be made now, unfortunately. That quintessentially 2000s overwrought manipulative reality TV vibe when we didn’t know any better. Without that drama, without the overwrought production that just wouldn’t happen today either, I just can’t see how it works. Either that or they try way too hard to be “cool”/modern/appealing to the TikTok generation and it ends up being bland trend chasing to get some kind of folky country act. But then anyone that kind of thing would appeal to isn’t sitting down every Saturday night to appointment event viewing. As said this kind of show is very of its time, it can’t work in this era of binge watching and catchup viewing.

I stopped watching The Voice because they produced no long term music stars (Becky Hill is kind of in spite of The Voice for me).

X Factor had ended the same - the music industry and the buying/streaming public has moved on

I'm late to this, but I think if any talent show format could work for Saturday night TV, it would be Dream Academy (the show that made Katsteye)

we'll not be watching x

It's kind of telling that Katie Waissel is being lynched by people on Twitter for speaking out against the idea of this coming back given all the darkness and controversies surrounding it. I get the feeling ITV probably think they'd have enough of an audience ignorant to it or willing to look past it all and embrace a comeback. It needs to be left dead and buried in the past.