I think the difference was that the show got three of the weakest dancers out of the way first, so that after that, the quality of the dancers was very good without being interspersed by poor dances. Georgia and Giovanni, Anita and Gleb, Peter and Janette, and Helen and Aliaz.

It was nice to see Jay knocked off the top of the leaderboard by Georgia and Giovanni; a far more likeable couple in my opinion.

Ian Hyland ‏@HylandIan 56m56 minutes ago

If #XFactor is as successful on catch-up as Cowell says, why show it live in the first place?
Pre-record it. Save money. Edit out mistakes.
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Adam ‏@AllAdzUp 54m54 minutes ago

@HylandIan what do you think is the solution? Scrap it for a few years?
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Ian Hyland
‏@HylandIan

@AllAdzUp Stick it on CITV.

I'm really not.
Cowell has always prided himself on knowing what the public want but the guy has totally lost the plot.

His own admission last week was a shambles. They dropped a well established host for two people who whilst are okay cant give a show like this any gravitas. Then we have "grimmy" Its the main reason I haven't watched one second this year I cant stand the guy.

Both Formats BGT and Xfactor have merged so much, Xfactor really is coming across as the inferior production now.

Dunno why you're posting that here, Mr Hyland is a t--t who has never said a positive word about Simon's shows.

Because it's a free country, I'm afraid.

I wonder if Cowell still thinks kicking Louis Walsh off the show and "freshening up" the panel was such a good idea?

Losing Louis and Dermot O'Leary probably hasn't helped at all. Trying to make the show "relevant" nearly always backfires on Cowell.

Those costs aren't a great comparison. £11m is what the BBC pay for one series of The Voice. By contrast, £150m is what ITV are paying for 3 series of X Factor plus 3 series of BGT plus the associated spin off shows. So a deeply flawed comparison. Not to mention that XF airs for more than double the hours that The Voice does so it will obviously cost a lot more for that reason.

X Factor is very expensive for entertainment but still probably costs less than an average hour of drama. Plus with its very young skew it has a pretty low breakeven point. Even if every episode rated as low as 5.6m ITV would still make a nice profit on it.

No getting away from just how horrific that rating is though. It seems to have completely collapsed in the last couple of weeks. I'm pretty sure The Voice will outlive it and I do think The Voice will stay with the BBC, so ITV need to get their arses in gear and start developing and ordering some new Saturday entertainment shows before their Autumn becomes a wasteland.

It'll be interesting to see how Cowell on AGT goes. It had a great year this year and I do think the Got Talent format is where he needs to focus his efforts now.

Losing Dermot and bringing in Olly, big mistake. Olly does have a fan base, but he also winds a lot of people up. I watched a couple but got a headache with the screaming, and found the whole process so samey and boring, not watched any recent episodes.

I'm not sure things would be much better with Louis and Dermot though. Perhaps a bit but they'd still be down. They'd be down whatever they did to be honest, it's just an old show now. Definitely time to start cutting back the hours.

Nick was actually quite good last night, shame it took 2 months to get there.

Cowell himself is really boring these days also. Completely lost any wit he may have had. Louis Walsh was the only personality for a good few years (unless you count try hard Nicole Scherzinger).

Well at least next week it's a low base to improve on.......

Or maybe if they'd left it alone all along there would hardly be any decline! I do kind of believe that, because whereas once they changed things every year for the better now all they seem to do is balls up whatever works and call it a revamp. This year I thought was going to be huge changes but all they did was change the casting (with crap choices) and take more and more heart out of the show. Making it nasty and immature has clearly been hilariously ineffective.

It's not all downhill, from Sky's latest results.


We watched the brilliant Mr Turner on Amazon Prime last night. Film 4 production, without the ads that will spoil it when it gets to C4.

Simon should probably have ignored the complainers and kept the show the exact same this year. Strictly has been the same dull format since the beginning and has worked. Viewers really don't like change. It's a shame as I've enjoyed this year's show (bar last Saturday's)more than other years.Cannot be denied that there have been a number of factors against XF this year mainly it's mess of a schedule with the rugby..

And there's no clash with Strictly next Saturday

For someone who presides over an empire of manufactured artists, Cowell has, ironically, fallen head first into the classic trap that his protégés lurch into, i.e. craving credibility while not recognising his limitations. He can't face what he actually is, i.e. king of a conveyor belt of compliant and ultimately disposable faces for songs written by professional composers. Instead, he demanded a Brit Award for One Direction and talks endlessly about TXF generating 'artists', when all the contestants are a million miles away from that.

The music industry is awash with acts that have no identity and no integrity and Cowell is in part responsible for that. This week saw Adele make a massive splash with a song she clearly had a personal investment in, sung from the heart: she really is an artist, has opinions and wants to plough her own furrow - something denied to all Cowell's acts. No wonder she gets a huge response to just one song while people tire of the X Factor panto …

They tried that in the past (they changed very little in 2012 despite falling ratings in 2011 and they lost 20% of the audience).

It is very clear that some of this year's changes haven't worked. The irony is that the 6 Chair Challenge, the bit that is branded so cruel, has received the highest ratings on average of the whole series. Difficult to know what to make of that.

I think the problem is that different viewers want the show to be different things, so they'll never please everyone, but they seem to instead have gone for a weird mix of everything and all it's meant is that the show has come across like it doesn't know what it wants to be and they end up pleasing next to nobody. It's a pity as the talent is actually good this year.

Also was Dermot actually axed? Or did he decide he'd had enough?

Shame isn't it, as I'm old enough to remember Saturday schedules that included ratings monsters like The Generation Game pulling in 19 million viewers and Coronation St getting anything less than 15 million was a cause for concern( not that it happened much). I think there are so many channels and commercial television is in a cut throat situation now where experimentation is out and truly dated shows like YBF are kept going merely because they're cheap and still make a small profit. Many channels now rely on repeats, imported reality shows and old shows as they can't afford to take risks and this probably explains why ratings are falling.

I still don't know. Reading between the lines in what even he said, you'd say he saw the writing was on the wall and bailed out before he was asked to. Nothing personal. Then again he did look chronically bored last year. Either way it was a bad thing to happen from XF's point of view - ironically the far longer presenter out of the two newbies is by far the weakest.

Cowell has been banging on too much about making the show "current" and "relevant", but I think he underestimated how popular Louis and Dermot are. Louis had been part of the furniture for 11 years.....Cowell must have assumed that Walsh was holding the show back and that people were sick of him but now he's seeing a disastrous fall off in viewers with the new panel (two million down on the Halloween show last year).

I agree with a lot of that.

Doctor Who is well made but tired. Appeals to the Doctor Who audience and not anybody else.

Although it could be argued that the Sunday marathons have held up better than the rest of the eps. If they had been split Sat/Sun they probably would have been worse off ratings wise.

X Factor was doing better on Sunday until last week. X Factor keeps changing but doesn't really. Same set, same titles.

For all the talk of revamp there hasn't really been one.

Like Doctor Who it has a dedicated audience and not anybody else.

Remember when XF did the main show and results live in the same night? Maybe we'll be back to that.

Changing the set and titles of course wouldn't actually change anything but would certainly indicate intent and not taking the audience for granted. As you say they keep tweaking things but really all they do is change things for the sake of it and not coming up with anything truly creative or something that simply works. As someone said the 6 chair challenge rated ok but is the general negativity associated with it dragging down the show as a whole? It comes across as so desperate and try hard to me - I liked Cowell best in his really nasty days but it felt like he was just being genuine and came up with some great lines. Being nasty for the sake of it is boring to me.