Even before watching that whole confessional, it has always been abundantly clear that Zoe Alexander was told to sing a Pink song. And when she said on stage "you told me to sing a Pink song", she is clearly referring to the producers.
There's a TikTok channel of "funniest X Factor auditions" and manipulation like this is now uncomfortably obvious. Ablisa for example introduce themselves in their VT as "I'm Abbie, I'm Lisa and together we're Abbie and Lisa"... yet by the time they appear on stage they have been rebranded "Ablisa". Where did that come from, in between shooting their VT and putting them on stage?
I've long suspected they surprised Ablisa with a different backing track in a different key than rehearsed... Zoe suggests they did that to her.
I remember going to the Manchester auditions the year Zoe was on. We stood in the queue outside, and as Zoe says, they would bring contestants to stand in front of the queue to record their "I'm in the queue" bit, even though the queue was the audience, not other contestants.
Once inside they told us who to cheer for. A warm-up guy would pop out and say "big cheers for this next one, no booing".
And of course, even the ATROCIOUS singers got to perform two songs in full, uninterrupted. After the first song the judges would calmly say "let's hear the second song". After the second song, the judges would react as if they had only just realised the person couldn't sing.
The judges would try and tease out pre-planned moments, with heavily scripted questions. One contestant had a cardboard cut-out of Mel B, but had forgotten to mention it, so Louis asked time and time again "who else are you a big fan of?"
There's a TikTok channel of "funniest X Factor auditions" and manipulation like this is now uncomfortably obvious. Ablisa for example introduce themselves in their VT as "I'm Abbie, I'm Lisa and together we're Abbie and Lisa"... yet by the time they appear on stage they have been rebranded "Ablisa". Where did that come from, in between shooting their VT and putting them on stage?
I've long suspected they surprised Ablisa with a different backing track in a different key than rehearsed... Zoe suggests they did that to her.
I remember going to the Manchester auditions the year Zoe was on. We stood in the queue outside, and as Zoe says, they would bring contestants to stand in front of the queue to record their "I'm in the queue" bit, even though the queue was the audience, not other contestants.
Once inside they told us who to cheer for. A warm-up guy would pop out and say "big cheers for this next one, no booing".
And of course, even the ATROCIOUS singers got to perform two songs in full, uninterrupted. After the first song the judges would calmly say "let's hear the second song". After the second song, the judges would react as if they had only just realised the person couldn't sing.
The judges would try and tease out pre-planned moments, with heavily scripted questions. One contestant had a cardboard cut-out of Mel B, but had forgotten to mention it, so Louis asked time and time again "who else are you a big fan of?"