Fleur's Uptown Funk performance was the moment X Factor became relevant again
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Version 0 of 1. Something unexpected happened on Saturday night. Something huge and magnificent that came out of nowhere and blasted a hole straight through our flimsy walls of perception. Something so sudden and enormous and completely unprecedented that it doesn’t seem like hyperbole to suggest that life itself may never be the same again. That’s right: The X Factor wasn’t terrible. Sure, the moment came and went before anyone properly realised what was going on. And sure, immediately after X Factor stopped being terrible, it went straight back to being terrible again, with more mediocre singers caterwauling more overfamiliar power ballads in exchange for more rote praise. But for the thimbleful of minutes that Fleur East performed the unreleased Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars single Uptown Funk on Saturday night, X Factor achieved something that it hadn’t really had a sniff of for years, if it ever achieved it at all – relevancy. This year, the war for Saturday night has been decisively concluded. Strictly Come Dancing has trounced X Factor in every way imaginable. It’s faster, it’s sexier. It’s on earlier and it has a better-defined sense of joy than its competitor. Plus, crucially, it has more viewers. In fact, the only thing that Strictly has in common with X Factor any more is its love affair with inexplicably awful singers. As a result, this year’s X Factor has lumbered along with its shoulders slumped in acknowledged defeat. Nowhere has this been more clear than with its choice of weekly themes. There was Disco week. There was 1980s week. There was even, in a moment of what can only be described as televisual self-loathing, an Elton John v Whitney Houston week. These are the themes of a show deep into its post-imperial phase. The themes of a show that has given up. The themes of a show content to let a dwindling trickle of talent scrape out the same hoary old rendition of I Will Always Love You year after year until the last remaining viewer gives up and dies of abject boredom. But Fleur East’s Uptown Funk performance was truly astonishing. Apparently cobbled together at the last minute after Simon Cowell heard and liked the song - although who knows whether that’s actually the case? Fleur barged in and left the competition in ruins. It was two minutes and 53 seconds of all-out attack; possibly the biggest moment that any Cowell show has produced since we first met Susan Boyle, only this was even more surprising because we already knew Fleur, and this far she’d merely been adequate. The performance instantly galvanised the show. It’s already number one in the iTunes singles charts – for comparison, downloads by Fleur’s fellow finalists Andrea and Ben are at numbers 54 and 60 respectively – and, while the Bruno Mars version of the song isn’t scheduled for release for another five weeks, his record company is reportedly scrambling to move this forward in the wake of such vast demand. Fleur’s victory in the X Factor final now seems all but guaranteed. The thing is, though, that the most impressive aspect of all this wasn’t Fleur’s singing, or even the song itself. No, it was that X Factor finally woke up and attempted to do something current. Instead of plodding along by the numbers, it wasn’t afraid to try something new. It was more nimble on its feet than it has been for ages. It regained the twinkle that Gary Barlow booted out of it during his dreary three-year tenancy. The fact that Fleur’s performance was immediately followed by a witlessly overwrought version of a hokey old Miley Cyrus ballad proves that X Factor still has a long way to go. The rest of this series, in fact, should be considered a write-off. What the show needs to do now is capture this spark, and can it, and extend it to all areas of next year’s series. Then, perhaps, it might once again become a show worth reckoning with. |