Top 5

X Factor contestants as annoying as Katie Waissel

Mike Pollitt | Monday 15 November, 2010 10:41

Ok, so she’s only being kept in because she’s a talking point (and this Top 5 is just playing in to the hype). And she actually did pretty decently in this week’s sing off (see how she even manages to be annoying when she does something well). But Katie Waissel remains intensely irritating, which makes her the latest in a well-stocked hall of shame. Here are five blasts from the X Factor past who were just as bad. Well, almost.

Danyl Johnson

The Katie Waissel of 2009. Same cockiness, same affectations, same calculated displays of mock vulnerability. Same gerrymandering by the judges to keep him in and prolong the pantomime villainy. Boooo.

Diana Vickers

More similarities to Waissel, notably the irksome prediliction for performing in bare feet because it’s somehow more “real” than singing in shoes, and the “poor little me” girlish simpering whenever the chips are down. Also, when you listen to this, it sounds like nothing so much as the screams of a mating fox. Horrid.

Daniel Evans

It’s not so much Daniel himself who was annoying as the producers who played on the death of his wife with remorseless cynicism. Here is the mawkish nadir, a death-themed sing off which reduced some of the more impressionable judges to tears, and condemned Scott Bruton, an infintely better singer, to elimination. The whole saga was a dark triumph of sentimentality over reason, which historians will doubtless draw on in the future to illustrate the fuzzy thinking which blighted public discourse in early 21st century Britain.

Same Difference

If the prissy, earnest, PG13 faces they put on in the first 10 seconds of this disgusting simperfest don’t make you vomit then Snipe doesn’t know what will.

G4

This video is rubbish quality, but that’s probably for the best. The fad for classicalising pop music needs to stop, it demeans both genres. They’re massacring a big part of Snipe’s adolescence here. The release of Hit Me Baby One More Time was a formative moment in our development into manhood. It should under no circumstances be turned into this.

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