Is X Factor Back From The Dead?
The Rest Is Entertainment
In this Q&A episode, Marina Hyde and Richard Osman address listener inquiries regarding the shifting economics of television and publishing.
Key takeaways
- An X Factor revival would be prohibitively expensive, potentially costing between £1.5 million and £2 million per episode.
- The BBC is facing budget constraints that make shows like Drag Race UK harder to justify despite their popularity.
Main topics
- X Factor revival rumors
- BBC programming cuts
Notable quotes
The world has moved on since humiliating people in that way in those audition rounds.
Conclusion
The episode provides a behind-the-scenes look at how economic pressure
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:00) The rest is entertainment is presented by Octopus Energy. Now, traditionally, the entertainment gatekeepers had to find you before an audience ever could. It's Speaker 2 (0:09) been the biggest change, really, I would say, in entertainment in the last five years or so. Just that generation who grew up making their own content on YouTube, on TikTok and things like that, suddenly finding themselves right at the heart of a culture. And they say no one had to commission it from them. Speaker 1 (0:23) Well, we talked before about Kane Parsons. Backrooms, he just made his incredible sort of YouTube series of shorts. And within a month, they'd gone so big that people were kind of battering down his door to direct a big movie version of it. And A24 eventually won and he created The Backrooms, which brought a huge audience online for that first weekend that was just a phenomenon. So. By the time the traditional gatekeepers arrive, you may have already proved there's an audience for what you've made. You haven't inherited a routine, you have built one yourself. Speaker 2 (0:53) And Octopus came into energy with customers as the starting point. It saw they weren't being well served and built things differently from there, with each account looked after by the same small team of around 10 Octopus energy specialists. Speaker 1 (1:12) Hello and welcome to this episode of The Rest Is Entertainment, Questions and Answers Edition. I'm Marina Hive. And Speaker 2 (1:18) I'm Richard Osman. Hello Marina. Hello Speaker 1 (1:21) Richard, how are you? Yeah, Speaker 2 (1:22) very well. Hello listeners, how are you? Plenty of questions to answer. We're going to start with an interesting one. And it's from Mona. This might be one of our shortest ever questions. Mona says, is X Factor Revival a bad idea? It's not even, is the X Factor revival a bad idea? Is X Factor revival a bad idea? Seven words. Speaker 1 (1:42) Okay, well, the reason we're talking about this is because this is a story that has appeared a lot over the last week, I have noticed. You will have noticed lots of stories about this. In fact, you might almost think this was a story that was happening. Let me get there. ITV cancelled X Factor in 2021 after, I think, 17 years. In terms of whether it's a bad idea, I don't know. First of all, you will have noticed lots of sub-stories to this. They've said Louis Walsh saying he would definitely come back on one condition that Sharon Osbourne was on. Then there's more stories driving on, like Maya Jama's been identified as the perfect presenter. She can bring a young audience. That's Speaker 2 (2:21) clever. Maya Jama gets identified as the perfect presenter for everything. Yeah, exactly. Mainly because she is. Speaker 1 (2:28) And it's not happening, by the way. Can I just say, this is a story that's got... Complete life of its own. By whom could such rumours be being stoked? I Speaker 2 (2:36) can't imagine. Speaker 1 (2:36) I simply cannot say. Speaker 2 (2:38) Who would make money from the X Factor? Speaker 1 (2:41) Who would, yeah, who's got two big formats, both of which are loving homages to earlier existing formats? No, I don't know. Who knows? It was made by Talkback Thames and obviously with Simon Cowell's show. I don't know where the rumours are coming from. I think it's pretty difficult to... First of all, it's very expensive. It used to cost like two million for an episode. I think even now you couldn't do it for about less than 1.5. So that means it would be costing what, you know, the really big shows like I'm a Celeb or whatever cost. The main problem, I think, is that there's a sort of, you know, the duty of care thing. The world has moved on since humiliating people in that way in those audition rounds. was sort of acceptable. And even though there was some of it in Simon Cowell's Netflix thing to find the name of the Marxist revolutionary group. Speaker 2 (3:34) December 10th. Speaker 1 (3:34) December 10th. It's quite hard. I mean, I actually think it's impossible to separate that format from the theatre of cruelty out of which it sort of sprung. So on the duty of care front, even if they've managed a way of kind of threading that needle, which maybe they would be able to do something, but it would make it more bland. I think it would still raise all those demons from the past. By the way, you haven't gone away. There are many, many contestants who are still Speaker 4 (3:57) saying Speaker 1 (3:58) that they were failed in a number of different ways by the programme. Some of them are organised into groups, blah, blah. So there are those kind of ongoing complaints. I don't think any more that the music industry would help. One of the secrets of the old format was that the music industry used to help a lot. Yes, an Speaker 2 (4:16) awful lot. They had their pipeline already and essentially those... pipelines were fused together to cast the thing. Speaker 1 (4:22) Yeah, most of those people who turned up, who were really good, don't let's forget, had already been found by labels. Yeah, a lot of Speaker 2 (4:29) them. Certainly there were lots of newcomers, but yeah, a lot of them had been seeded, yeah. Yeah, there was a Speaker 1 (4:34) significant number had already been found and spotted and developed and maybe even trained to some degree by the labels. I don't think that they would help at all now because I think there are just so many different ways. You know, we can see people have surfaced via the platforms and totally by social media platforms. Yeah, the world has changed. And I don't think, you know, it would be a light. It can be a liability to be on something like this, which is just too risky. So I don't think they would help. So although you keep reading stories about this, I. do not believe that reality will be bent to this outcome and that they will bring back the X factor. I definitely don't think ITV are thinking about it for one second. But maybe at some point, Netflix or Disney or someone with tons of money will revive it. But as I say, without that theater of cruelty, it doesn't particularly work. It's too bland as a format. And if you do have it, then I think it just becomes a liability. It's like these people don't provide news programming for a reason. There are lots of things in television now that are just a liability. Like, you know, I don't do news. I don't do political programming. It's just a liability. This would be a liability and you'd be paying to put yourself at risk because you're dealing with lots of young people and it's a big hassle in lots and lots of different ways. There are other things that we're seeing. You know, we talked about the Mickey Mouse Club revival. We talked about that. And clearly Netflix in a... very controlled way with Simon Cowell's last show did that. I don't think that, by the way, was some monster hit. And it didn't, you know, catch the world alight at all. Speaker 2 (6:07) Which may, by the way, have some relation to why these rumours are surfacing. Speaker 1 (6:11) Yeah, maybe. Speaker 2 (6:12) Yeah, it's incredible when you think of what a behemoth X Factor was. It was super massive. And, you know, these things do decline and that had really declined to the point where there's no return on investment for... ITV. So financially, it doesn't work for them. In terms of kudos, it doesn't work for them. Because as you say, I've become a slightly tainted brand. And in terms of production, it doesn't work for them, because it has all the issues that you were talking about. Brands do not die. I mean, if I think about some of the early Endemol shows, Big Brother, Deal on No Deal, still going. in different places because there's ways to reinvent them and things that we have happy memories of and, you know, a generation before suddenly going, oh, God, Speaker 4 (6:45) do Speaker 2 (6:45) you remember the X Factor? How amazing that was. There are ways of reimagining it. The way you are not going to currently reimagine it is as a two million pounds an episode show on terrestrial television. It's just that's not the world that we live in. There isn't a channel who could afford it. There isn't a channel who would want it. And as you say, there isn't an industry that needs it in the way that it used to. Speaker 1 (7:06) In not entirely unrelated questioning, Richard, can I ask a question on behalf of Isabella Pennings, who is talking about Drag Race, saying why would the BBC axe Drag Race UK, a seemingly very popular and cheap to produce show? Speaker 2 (7:21) Yes, it is related in some ways. I mean, the key word in that question is seemingly. So seemingly very popular and cheap to produce show. And listen, we know the BBC is really cutting its cloth at the moment and getting rid of an awful lot of shows. That's only just begun, I would say. You look at the things that, you know, we've talked before about Live at the Apollo, Newsnight being turned into a chat show. Lots of older brands that, you know, are being put out to pasture. So Drag Race, it's certainly very, very noisy. It's certainly very, very, very loved by the people who love it. It's not huge. It's not insanely huge. It really, really punches above its weight, Drag