[Z]

Imagine Girls Aloud are in this series of the X Factor, instead of Belle Amie. They are five girls thrown together by the judges (for argument's sake; Simon, Louis, Dannii and Sharon Osbourne) and have only performed together once (at Simon's house.)

How do you reckon they'd have fared?

I reckon they'd have been gone in the blink of an eye. Girls aren't going to vote for a girl band when there are cute boy bands and male solo singers to vote for instead; and Girls Aloud were a shambles for the first bit of their career, they definitely wouldn't have been able to pull it together for the first live show on the X Factor and Sarah Harding would have been the victim of the tabloids for saucy scandals in her past, Cheryl too...

Bearing all of that in mind, should the X Factor scrap the groups and launch a separate show to launch groups if they're so determined to do so? It just seems stupid to build the hopes up of girls who have done nothing wrong other than look pretty; only for them to be dashed because girls don't like other girls. The girl groups are always predictably in the bottom two within the first three weeks, and any that make it further than that are extremely lucky.