What I'll miss about The X Factor – and it's not the singing

Farewell then The X Factor. Like most of the nation, I stopped watching during one of Cheryl’s interregnums, but for better and more often worse, certain images from the show remain indelibly seared onto my memory’s image bank.

The styling of both the contestants and the judges was atrocious – but what do you expect from a show that was masterminded by a man who wore his trouser waistbands up round his armpits and was still sporting designer stubble some two decades after even the cheesiest Gorgonzola had abandoned that look?

Was The X Factor representative of British style? Certain aspects of British style, perhaps. How can this be, you ask, when foreigners – especially foreign designers – endlessly eulogise the cool, eclectic, un-done naturalness of Brit style?

Then again, those designers have never watched The X Factor, being too busy scrutinising pictures of Alexa Chung, Sienna Miller and early Kate Moss. They must never be allowed to see the truth.

Not that the truth is terrible – it’s just a mixed bag. The wonderful thing about British style is that it’s all-embracing. For every fresh faced Florence Pugh, for all the Duchess of Cambridge’s demure understatement, there’s someone about to light a flare between their buttocks and someone else wearing four sets of eyelash extensions and an entire tube of congealed glue.

All human foibles were here which is why in the end you had to love the show’s free-form approach to eyeshadow; Simon’s neon white teeth, Wagner’s perplexing hair and the way it reflected his perplexing performances (was he for real or an evil hoax?); Cheryl’s ability to make haute couture “relatable” and the fact that Sharon Osbourne appeared to have drawn her style inspiration from an unusual blend of Dick Turpin and Ru Paul.

Of course the show could be very cruel in ways that probably wouldn’t be tolerated today. Not just the early audition rounds that mocked the afflicted or the time that Little Mix were, inevitably, all put in cropped tops, apart from Jesy Nelson, but the way the female judges were pitted against one another.

Jesy Nelson has since been vocal about the abuse she received on social media for her weight. The celebrities weren’t protected either. Graham Norton and his guest Sharon Osbourne devoted a lengthy segment on his chat show to Dannii Minogue’s immovable forehead. Norton even wrapped some cling film around his forehead to mimic Minogue while Osbourne, Minogue’s co-judge on The X Factor at the time, almost had a hernia from laughing. It was funny. But I doubt Norton would go down that path now. To her credit, Minogue kept on trucking.

It’s camp and the tackiness is part of a British pantomime tradition, but The X Factor’s values and presentation need a massive rethink. It’s probably for the best that the sequins and the sociopaths were laid to rest.

Lisa Armstrong's column appears each Saturday in The Saturday Telegraph and is published online every Saturday at 6am on Telegraph Fashion.

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