[Red Moon]

What's the perfect talent show sob story?

Daniel Evans can't sing for toffee - so the X Factor contestant is
milking the sympathy vote for all it's worth

WTF? Daniel Evans lives to sing another day. Again. Are X Factor viewers so soft, so pathetic, so easily swayed by sympathy that a mere mention of Daniel Evans' deceased spouse gets them voting for him in their legions? Apparently they are.

To give Evans his due, it's a strategy that's working. With Laura the latest to be axed, it's becoming increasingly likely that Dead Wife (as he's known in the blogosphere and beyond) will win The X Factor. This is an outcome that will be momentarily enjoyable just to see the look on Simon Cowell's face - but only momentarily, as it will then be clear that this year's X Factor is to be filed alongside 2004, the year of Steve Brookstein. (Should Dead Wife win, one imagines Danni Minogue will be pleased, but as she seems incapable of moving her face, it'll be impossible to tell).

As Peter Kay presciently pointed out in Britain's Got the Pop Factor, talent show contestants are as prepared to milk the memory of departed relatives as the shows themselves are to play up the tragedy. Though in the case of R Wayne, his dead granny couldn't trump Geraldine, with her story of her lopped-off cock.

Seeing as X Factor voters are such suckers for a sob story, I'd like to invite you to post what you think would be the perfect sob story for an X Factor contestant. No trauma is too private to be prostituted, no grief too great to employ in the manipulation of the audience. In these emotionally incontinent times, the more harrowing the heartbreak the better. Knock yourselves out with stories of sorrow and attempts to triumph over tragedy.

And while you're pondering upon that, do you think Dead Wife will win The X Factor? Then all he'd have to do to complete the fairy tale is to marry Asbo Mum and live happily ever after. Or at least until his record company drop him in a year's time.

Source: The Guardian