Danyl was one of the worst singers ever! I do think with training he could improve, but i don't know that he wants to improve. I think he thinks he's the [!@#$%^&*] and since everyone keeps telling him that he's gonna keep doing what he's doing. I will say that I've never heard someone so out of tune get so much praise.

I think Olly would be the most successful, but they could do something with Stacey too. Joe is too musical theater so his career would go nowhere.

I think Joe could have a successful career with the right backing. Musical theater types can be very popular. They just get crap material because most of the music out these days, especially if Simon Cowell is involved, is crap. People say he's like Leon, which just shows me how generic that criticism is, because Leon was as far from musical theater as you can get.

Olly seems very smarmy onstage and seems to not have a lot of singing or dancing ability, and he's not very attractive with his current hairstyle. He does have charisma, but he's going to need help. Unfortunately he won't get that from Simon, who only seems to care about Danyl.

Supposedly Simon wants Danyl to become popular in America. Something tells me that will not happen. I just don't see him fitting in here. I think that will only happen if it's by accident, and someone humble, and with a good story to propel her, like what happened with Susan Boyle.

I think with Leon it's not that they're similar musically, but both are dull and forgettable and you can see the writing on the wall. All the people voting and raving about Joe because he's the best singer won't buy his album. It's just like Kris Allen on American Idol. People act like it's about the best singer, then they don't care when that person wins.

I look at Will Young and I do think you can be a fairly traditional pop singer without all the dancing and bells and whistles, but I don't know that Joe is interesting enough to pull that off. I also have major doubts that whoever is backing him would produce a good album. We'll see, but I think he's the most difficult to make a star.

Olly has limitations, but I can see them molding him into something good. He has a good recording voice so his songs will sound good and they can work on the rest. I do believe Simon wants Danyl in America, but surely he'll cut his losses by now? He's tried to push this "Danyl is the greatest!!" thing on us, but it hasn't worked. Just give it up already. I think they did a disservice to him by constantly pimping him.

I think with Leon it's not that they're similar musically, but both are dull and forgettable and you can see the writing on the wall. All the people voting and raving about Joe because he's the best singer won't buy his album. It's just like Kris Allen on American Idol. People act like it's about the best singer, then they don't care when that person wins.

I think the people who are going on about what a good singer he is are more likely to buy his album. It's when you hear people talking about how hot someone is, or how they have "it", or how sorry they feel for the person, or how awful the other person who might win is, that you will have a more guaranteed flop. To a lot of people, Kris Allen wasn't seen as the best singer in his season, he was seen as a nice guy, as cute, as not being Adam.

I never thought Rhydian was all that memorable, beyond his hair and his muscular body, and his material after the show was, from what I've heard, a not all that great cover album. Some said that Leon's album was quite a bit better than Rhydian's. But since people remembered Rhydian's voice, they were loyal enough to give Rhydian decent sales and a second album.

I don't believe any of the people from this season will become big stars. I think having anyone from this show, which is a huge ugly circus mostly about shock value and about the judges, become a big star is difficult. The only big star they had was Leona and thanks to poor choices of singles, and generally uninspired material, she seems to be fading.

For a long term career in music, not a big career but a long, profitable one, I think Joe has the best potential, if he can get better representation than the likes of Cowell. Olly, there's always a chance. I don't think Stacey is there yet (she needs to learn how to "sell" songs, and she's a bit wobbly), but she has some charisma and might find a niche. Since Olly and Joe get a lot of hate, I think Stacey will win. Whether she has a career from that win, who knows.

Edited December 7, 200916 yr by CarlD2

<p><span style="font-size:19.5pt;"><font face="Verdana">The real X Factor winner - Simon Cowell</font></span>

<span style="font-size:10.5pt;"><b><font face="Verdana">Joe McElderry might have swiped the official title, but it was Simon Cowell’s night again. Here’s how he did it again</font></b></span>

<span style="font-size:7.5pt;"><b><font face="Tahoma">Caitlin Moran</font></b></span>

<span style="font-size:9pt;"><font face="Verdana">So, 18-year-old Joe McElderry — or “Joe McElderberry”, as he will always be called by confused elderly relatives — won last night’s X Factor. As a pleasant, unassuming, white-toothed boy whose pop-cultural usefulness will span all the way from singing “sad” ballads to singing “reflective” ballads, McElderry wakes up today with a recording contract, instant fame, and an almost-certain Christmas No 1.

Of course, as we know, this is no guarantee of eternal future happiness. On the one hand, Leona Lewis, Alexandra Burke and JLS enjoy massive success and record sales. On the other hand, 2004 winner Steve Brookstein is currently playing Pizza Express in Maidstone. X Factor giveth, and X Factor taketh away.

No. The only guaranteed winner in all of this is the man who now has McElderry signed to his record company, after raking the millions from the phone votes in support of McElderry, and through the TV production company that he owns. Simon Cowell.

This morning, McElderry surveys a punishing, year-long schedule of recording, performing, publicity and uncertainty. Cowell, meanwhile, is on his private jet to spend a month in Barbados — suitcase presumably full of high-waisted swimming trunks and fags. Every year, the ultimate winner of X Factor is Simon Cowell.

But Cowell did not start this decade as a winner. At the beginning of this decade, Simon Cowell was mad.

“I was so mad,” he confirmed, in a recent interview in GQ. As a middle-ranking music industry player, Cowell’s Nineties — that inventive decade of Britpop, trip-hop and superstar DJs — had been spent, by and large, making joyless novelty singles for children: the Teletubbies’ Teletubbies Say Eh-Oh, Zig & Zag’s Dem Girls, the World Wrestling Federation’s Slam Jam, and the official Mighty Morphin Power Rangers single, which was called — with the kind of admirably brisk creative brutality that has made Cowell the man he is today — The Official Single. After all, why waste time coming up with names for songs, when you could be in a meeting, hammering out Latin American residuals with a couple of lawyers?

All of this had made Cowell rich, which Cowell liked — Cowell has said that his ideal income would be “as much money as I can get my hands on,” which is a fairly useful ballpark figure to start the business day with — but it wasn’t quite the point. Cowell, you see, wanted to be right in the middle of the cultural action — and however many Thunderzords you load into the video, it was clear that the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers single wasn’t going to do that.

This overriding desire was brought home to Cowell in 2000, when he made what — according to all available paperwork on Cowell — was the only bad business decision he’s made in the last ten years: he turned down the opportunity to be a judge on ITV’s new talent show, Popstars. The show instantly became one of the biggest shows on TV — annoying enough for Cowell, but with an extra twist of the knife: the judge they brought in instead of Cowell — Nigel Lythgoe — rapidly morphed into tabloid cartoon figure, “Nasty Nigel.” This proved to be a very lucrative market: TV bad guy. It was so easy! Simply say something harsh, but supposedly “helpful”, to some eager young wannabe, and suddenly you’re someone we all “love to hate!”

Lythgoe promptly went to America and made his fortune being, for the want of a better phrase, a British man-bitch as the producer/judge on the US TV juggernaut So You Think You Can Dance.

Cowell was furious. He could do that!

“I thought, ‘I’ve got to retaliate’,” he said in GQ. “I wanted Popstars off the market. I want to be on the show that’s going to kick it off the air.” And so in 2001, Pop Idol was launched — essentially Popstars, but with Simon Cowell in it. In 2003, Cowell went on to devise and judge X Factor — essentially Pop Idol, but with Simon Cowell in it and producing it through his production company, Syco.

Cowell’s big fortune was just about to be made from simply taking someone else’s idea, and doing it bigger, and more dramatically than anyone else. Just like taking Leonard Cohen’s filigree Hallelujah to No 1 by reconfiguring it as a gospel-backed, bawling power ballad for Alexandra Burke. And so we entered our current era: the Era of Cowell. In their current reviews of the Noughties, nearly every newspaper, magazine and TV show has named Cowell one of the men of the decade — if not the man of the decade, if you ignore America’s first black President, and/or the Pope.

With X Factor and its sister-show, Britain’s Got Talent, Cowell has provided a two-show, year-spanning wrapround entertainment service which he’s franchised across the globe. You can see tremulous wannabes going to boot camp in Morocco, Finland and Khazakstan.

And deservedly — for both shows are enjoyably, brutally effective in providing that most modish of concepts: a “360 service.” As a viewer, watching the show, it’s like repeatedly having a cannon full of heartbreak, euphoria and glitter fired into your face. At the start of the show, the judges advance on to the stage, ready to change the lives of the fortunate, in a fusillade of pyrotechnics and 40ft idealised projections of their faces — as if they are some cross between the ancient Gods of Rome, and Colonel Gaddafi. It’s often hard to remember that, actually, underneath all of that, it’s just Dannii Minogue. Then, once the show has finished, you have a whole week of enjoyable conversations on the subject with friends, colleagues and people in call centres.

It’s a most useful service. One need never be stuck for conversation in a lift, if one has recourse to brightly chirrup “Did you see Jedward doing Oops I Did It Again? Literally, amazing.” It’s an instant source of gossip and wonder.

But on top of this, in the decade that saw the bottom fall out of both the TV industry and the music industry — ITV registering a loss of £2.78 billion, music industry on its knees from the rise in file-sharing — Simon Cowell has been one of the few people to find a way to make entertainment pay. If the Noughties were all about the medium, rather than the message — iPods and iPlayer, instead of any particularly dazzling artistic innovations — Cowell has sold us the medium of making stars: the auditions, singing lessons and styling experiments; the crises of nerves and sudden breakthroughs in confidence.

As anyone looking at his back catalogue knows, Simon Cowell does not know anything about music: according to his interview in GQ, he believes that music peaked in 1959 with Mack the Knife. He hated punk, and house. He wishes he could have signed the Beatles — “but only for the royalties”. And, of course, there’s Robson & Jerome.

No — what Simon Cowell knows is business. And that’s ultimately what the X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent are about: Cowell’s running of a business, turned into a light entertainment soap. It’s a reality-TV show about Simon Cowell’s empire — with the neat twist of us giving him impeccable market research feedback on his prospective signings at 35p a pop from landlines, mobile networks may vary.

What’s amazing in all of this — Cowell as Man of the Decade, his 50th birthday party reported on as breathlessly as the inauguration of Barack Obama — is how little we know, or, more importantly, perceive, of Simon Cowell. While he’s scarcely publicity shy or reclusive, his private life is so effectively ring-fenced, it’s hard to get a pap-shot of him smoking a fag — let alone some sizzling insight into his sex life. But even what we see of him is spun back to us partly by Cowell, and partly by a media in thrall to him.

If you knew nothing of Cowell, and watched X Factor for the first time, you wouldn’t see some sexy mogul — some swaggeringly iconoclastic business superman.

You’d see a man who looks profoundly uncomfortable, even though it’s his own show. He practically grimaces every time he has to address the camera, and unlike the other judges — more versed in show business — when Cowell advances on stage at the beginning of a show, he looks like he’d give anything to run away. He has the tight, awkward smile of someone who would really like to get back to his dressing room, and check the e-mails on his BlackBerry, instead.

For all his bullish business confidence, his personal tastes are timid: the same white T-shirts, the same suits, the same Mr Topper £7 haircut. His taste in food is childish, nursery; all pasta and custard. His “comments” — insults — to the contestants don’t have any wider context than “I’m sorry, I don’t like it,” or “I’m sorry — I don’t get it” — his is an imagination that runs no further than the Preferences of Cowell.

It’s all at the extreme end of male behaviour — fearful of anything that changes, or challenges his routines and opinions. Culturally, this technically makes him, by André Gide’s criteria, a tyrant: “Tyranny is the absence of complexity or nuance.” There’s certainly no complexity or nuance in Simon’s creative world — all big band, girl-groups and ballads. Neither Simon Cowell — nor any of his acts — are suddenly going to have a Bag In, make a video where they kiss a black Christ or bring in a cataclysmic sideswipe of grime-core beats before the chorus.

And so this was the Era of Simon Cowell: in a decade in which change was rapid, whole industries crumbled and global recession rattled the Western world, we wanted something huge, yet certain. Lehman’s might fall, but Cowell never would.

But there, in the middle of the Simon Cowell decade, was Simon Cowell himself, quietly and unexpectedly depressed. “I get very dark moods for no reason,” he told the Daily Mail. “I just sit on my own for days. I get to points in my life where I never think I’m going to be happy.”

Because if there’s one thing more likely to make you more unhappy than seeing the world as dazzlingly, unworkably complex and random, it’s seeing the world as nothing more than a huge, binary machine, with just an “on” and an “off” switch. “winners” and “losers.” “Joe McElderry” or “Steve Brookstein”.</font></span>

<span style="font-size:7.5pt;"><b><font face="Tahoma">http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article6955247.ece</font></b></span></p>

Lythgoe promptly went to America and made his fortune being, for the want of a better phrase, a British man-bitch as the producer/judge on the US TV juggernaut So You Think You Can Dance.

Cowell was furious. He could do that!

Nigel didn't start SYTYCD - which is not exactly a juggernaut, it is a niche show which has slowly lost steam in the summer and has recently tanked in the fall lineup - until 2005. American Idol started in 2002, and most of the first season centered around Simon and how the public reacted to him. Nigel was one of the main producers on that show (until this year), but stayed offcamera most of the time. Simon became known to the American public long before Nigel did.

Edited December 14, 200916 yr by CarlD2

Oh, boy.

Nigel didn't start SYTYCD - which is not exactly a juggernaut, it is a niche show which has slowly lost steam in the summer and has recently tanked in the fall lineup - until 2005. American Idol started in 2002, and most of the first season centered around Simon and how the public reacted to him. Nigel was one of the main producers on that show (until this year), but stayed offcamera most of the time. Simon became known to the American public long before Nigel did.

Nygel came to US in 2002 (as a judge and producer) and Cowell became judge in 2002 too.

I do like the idea of Simon reading this article and reacting to the idea that he was an unknown in America before the hugely iconic Muppet Lythgoe.

Nygel came to US in 2002 (as a judge and producer) and Cowell became judge in 2002 too.

Nigel wasn't a judge, on his other show, until 2005. I don't think he was ever a judge on Idol, although perhaps there was some time I forgot. He stayed behind the scenes, generally, until SYTYCD. Simon was the face of Idol, from the start.

Edited December 14, 200916 yr by CarlD2

Sorry, I forgot to say, other than that the article is very true, and a good insight to his mind.

Yes, that's how it went. But I don't know if the article says what you think it does. It's kind of ambiguous. Does He could do that refer to So You Think You Can Dance or to Nygel's British Popstars stint? I think the latter. So technically it can be debated whether there are mistakes. Perhaps she meant: Cowell could've been a judge of Popstars and went to US. Or something like that. Irrelevant.

So what's this about X Factor coming to the US? On NBC or Fox?

The way it was worded, I thought she was implying that Simon was jealous of Nigel becoming well known in the UK and then in the US, and that's why he decided to do Pop Idol.

I think she greatly overestimates the success of SYTYCD in the States, but perhaps she just misspoke about the rest.

I had heard the show was going to FOX. There are some reports Dermot will be the host, others say Cheryl, or that Cheryl will be one of the judges, and Dermot will still host.

Joe McElderry could barely sing the song that will be his first number one for grinning.

Matt Damon lookalike

The comments about Sir Paul were nice.

Edited December 15, 200915 yr by CarlD2

I always thought Simon was made a judge on Idol due to the success of Nigel on Popstars. Back to X Factor, I do hope the show comes to the US. They could attempt it in the fall instead of two SYTYCD seasons. I just hope they don't tone down the ridiculousness of it. I love the stage and how it feels like you're at a gladiator match. And the wacky choreography and such. I just hope we don't get a panel as dull as the UK. If Simon can't come then bring Louis and Cheryl over and go from there. If on FOX it would probably air tues-wed so it should be no problem for them to fly over. Similar to what they do with DWtS.