| LETTERS FROM LONDON |
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| REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL 7 June 2011 |
| 1. Cheryl Who Breath-holding until fainting is no longer an option, scantily-clad gyrating ‘dancers’, Amanda Holden’s plastic face-mask, Simon’s curious flattened hedgehog hair, the epileptic-inducing lighting, the beyond brainless acts, voices that have been implausibly manipulated technically: so falsely-tuned, auto- tuned, doubled-over, frequency-enhanced, tone-generated and super-echoed, a cat would sound like Maria Callas and lest we forget, when someone forgot to alter Katie Perry’s voice on The X Factor, we discovered that she absolutely can not sing. More about Cheryl Cole and The X Factor 2. Oh That 'F' Word Again Same old, same old rhetoric. Sigh. So boring. ‘Boys will be boys’, ‘It’s all a bit of fun’, ‘I’m empowered because I’m getting paid’. If one person interviewed or one person calling into a talk show spent one moment to think, would they be so stupid. ‘It’s not about you’. Trying to imagine a wider context than aggressive self-interest and self-referring might be too much to ask. More about Hugh Hefner and the Playboy Club |