{"id":1344,"date":"2007-10-21T05:54:00","date_gmt":"2007-10-21T05:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/larelle.wordpress.com\/2007\/10\/21\/a-guilty-pleasure"},"modified":"2007-10-21T05:54:00","modified_gmt":"2007-10-21T05:54:00","slug":"a-guilty-pleasure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/larelleread.co.uk\/?p=1344","title":{"rendered":"A Guilty Pleasure?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>    Yes! I admit, I watch <span style=\"font-style:italic;\">X Factor<\/span>. Do you think I&#8217;d get away with calling it a guilty pleasure? I like to think so, because it will let me off the hook for liking it. This week saw the start of the show &#8220;for real&#8221; with the final 12 acts chosen to sing live to the public. This year there are 4 categories: Males (aged 14-25), Females (aged 14-25), Groups and Over 25&#8217;s mentored by four judges: Simon Cowell (groups), Louis Walsh (+ 25&#8217;s), Dannii Minogue (males), and Sharon Osbourne (females).<\/p>\n<p \/>This is what I thought of the final 12&#8217;s performances tonight (and what I have thought of them up til this point).<\/p>\n<p \/><span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">Females:<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">Kimberley &#8211;<\/span> totally robbed tonight. Thought she gave a good performance. Not the strongest, granted, but it was high energy and she definitely has a strong voice.<br \/><span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">Alisha &#8211;<\/span> probably will end up stronger vocally than Kim so deserved to stay, but both ladies should NOT have been in the bottom two. Her performance wasn&#8217;t strong, especially the second time round (but hard as she knew she was in the bottom two at that stage) and the song choice didn&#8217;t let her show of her vocal capabilities.<br \/><span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">Emily &#8211;<\/span> tough stuff for someone who&#8217;s only 15, but she did well. It wasn&#8217;t the strongest performance, but hey, she&#8217;s 15 and she&#8217;s singing to an audience of about 7 million people so, you know&#8230;in the grand scheme of things. I&#8217;m sure she&#8217;ll get better.<\/p>\n<p \/><span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">Males:<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">Leon &#8211;<\/span> he sounded fantastic, if a bit TOO much like Michael Buble`! He was totally slagged off by the judges. Yeah, it was a bit messy musically, but the bloke can sure sing.<br \/><span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">Andy &#8211;<\/span> a bit cheesy for my liking. There are strong parts to his voice. It&#8217;s unique, but a little weak to me. We&#8217;ll see what happens with him. Maybe it was just song choice letting him down.<br \/><span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">Rhydian &#8211;<\/span> OMFG! What can I say? Well, the guy is a knob as far as I am concerned. I totally agree with Sharon there. He&#8217;s WAY too OTT for me. He&#8217;s got a great theatrical voice. Great for the West End, not for X Factor.<\/p>\n<p \/><span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">Groups:<\/span><br \/><span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">Hope &#8211;<\/span> bleah! Pussy Cat Dolls wannabe&#8217;s. They did Rihanna&#8217;s Umbrella. It seems the only freakin&#8217; song they can do, seeing it&#8217;s the only bloody one I&#8217;ve seen the perform! I mean, YAWN!<br \/><span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">Futureproof &#8211;<\/span> like the name, but that&#8217;s about it. Just another turgid boyband. Even more so considering they didn&#8217;t actually exist as a group at the beginning of X Factor, but were the &#8220;reject&#8221; boys that were the rejected 6 from bootcamp. And that&#8217;s also how Hope were formed.<br \/><span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">Same Difference &#8211;<\/span> OMG! Get me a gun, now! Like a brother and sister Steps &#8211; and predictably end up doing Tragedy (a Steps cover of the Bee Gee&#8217;s song). And it was as the song title suggested. I was sure they were going to be in the bottom two with Rhydian&#8230;but what do <span style=\"font-style:italic;font-weight:bold;\">I<\/span> know?<\/p>\n<p \/><span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">Over 25&#8217;s:<\/span><br \/>The best lot&#8230;<br \/><span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">Beverley &#8211;<\/span> Fantastic, and more so &#8216;cos she&#8217;s a Luton girl!!! Great voice, good performance. Simon slagged her off for not being able to dance&#8230;erm, it&#8217;s a SINGING contest isn&#8217;t it?<br \/><span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">Niki &#8211;<\/span> best performance of the night. Great voice. She&#8217;ll do well.<br \/><span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">Daniel &#8211;<\/span> not the best performance, but heart-felt. He&#8217;ll do better. I&#8217;m sure I&#8217;ll have more to say on him as time goes on.<\/p>\n<div class=\"blogger-post-footer\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"posterous_download_image\" src=\"\" height=\"1\" alt=\"\" width=\"1\" \/><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yes! I admit, I watch X Factor. Do you think I&#8217;d get away with calling it a guilty pleasure? I like to think so, because it will let me off the hook for liking it. This week saw the start of the show &#8220;for real&#8221; with the final 12 acts chosen to sing live to &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/larelleread.co.uk\/?p=1344\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;A Guilty Pleasure?&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[70,201,270,311,316],"class_list":["post-1344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-celebrity","tag-music","tag-reviews","tag-television","tag-thoughts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/larelleread.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/larelleread.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/larelleread.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/larelleread.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/larelleread.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/larelleread.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1344\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/larelleread.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/larelleread.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/larelleread.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}