I have a really guilty confession – I have started watching the X-factor

I know, I know. It is Chav TV par excellence. It is utterly moronic. The audience bay like those demanding death at the Coliseum and has a collective IQ of 17. The whole thing is truly frightful and I am truly ashamed to admit it but, late in life, I have become hooked.

There is drama. I kind of knew that Abi was toast on Sunday, she gave a weak performance the day before and though a sweet girl from somewhere in the Grim North she did not have the X factor. But there was drama none the less as she entered a sing off with Hannah, a girl who cannot articulate a single word properly. Surely she has to go soon?

All the contestants bar 1 seem to come either from the Grim North or Essex or South London. A few of them can speak proper English. And, dare I say it, some of them seem quite good at singing.

The real appeal is the Judges. American Nicole is truly ghastly and makes the audience seem like a collection of Nobel Prize winners. But there is something endearing in quite how thick and shallow she is. It goes without saying that no-one could be a patch on the UK’s leading chanteuse Ms Cheryl Cole.

The rather camp Louis Walsh seems like a nice man although I am not sure that he would be my first pick for the pub quiz team. Sharon O. is almost as ghastly as Nicole in a rougher, older manner. And she is not as thick as the American. No-one is as thick as Nicole. If you had a gap in your pub quiz team and had to choose between Nicole and a loaf of bread, you’d go for the loaf any day.

However, Gary Barlow is just a class act. He is witty and cutting, kind and cruel and, compared to everyone else involved in this spectacle, he is an intellectual colossus.

So I am hooked on the chaviest most low-grade junk TV going.  I really cannot think of any more of a guilty confession to make. But I felt I should come clean.