Last night we paid our first visit to The X Factor 2012 Boot Camp – the second installment is of course airing tonight on ITV1 – and I have a gripe…
Well, I have a few actually, but one of the main ones is this Boot Camp tradition to hear the acts singing in groups of three.
Why? They won’t be singing in the live shows in sets of three will they? Unless they ARE a group of course…
But the solo singers are of course just that; solo singers, and therefore, putting them into groups with others is just plain pointless and I think it really puts many of the singers at a big disadvantage.
We saw a lot of the truly good solo artists struggling last night, including Jahmene Douglas who forgot the words to Maroon 5’s – by now intensely annoying, we heard it that many times – song Moves Like Jagger…
The thing is, when the singers go to the live shows, not only will they sing alone, so they don’t need to play well with others in any sense of the words, they get a whole week to rehearse rather than a few hours as they did at Boot Camp.
But because he messed up, you could see Jahmene was visibly shaken and his confidence severely knocked. And it was utterly avoidable. Here’s a reminder…
How much harder would it have been to just let the singers pick their own songs and sing individually?
I get that there are time constraints with Boot Camp, but rather than lose truly talented singers for the sake of squeezing them all in, why not – in future – either put less singers through from auditions, or make Boot Camp a couple of days longer?
It was the singing in sets things that I think put paid to Robbie Hance at Boot Camp too…
Granted, it could be deemed that he’d behaved unprofessionally by taking “power naps” and therefore not rehearsing, but as he’s homeless and sleeps on the streets of London, one might therefore assume that he doesn’t get a full eight hours most nights.
And again, he didn’t help himself by just walking off rather than fronting it out and waiting for the judges’ decisions; after all, they let Jahmene off for fluffing things so they might have done the same for Robbie.
It reminded me somewhat of Cher Lloyd in her year. Remember when, at Cheryl Cole’s Judge’s House, Cher got a bad throat and couldn’t perform so she assumed it was all over, and weeping, said, “I’m sorry, I’m done…” before walking away?
Well, she was given another chance and look at her now.
I wish the same sort of thing had happened to Robbie because he was not only a good singer, he seemed like a genuinely nice guy.
Here’s a reminder of Robbie’s Boot Camp fail…
So, now I’d like to hear what you think – is the current format of Boot Camp basically f***ing it up for some singers? And if so, how could it be changed?
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