So, at last it’s over. With all the finality of a particularly big turd thudding into the toilet bowl, the winner of MTV3’s X Factor 2010 was announced last Saturday. The grand finale was held in a big hall seemingly filled with all the dry ice, lasers, tacky neon lights and flamethrowers left over from Lordi’s Eurovision performance in 2006. The stage looked like the bastard offspring of a particularly bad acid trip and a mid-80s warehouse rave, complete with the resplendent bombast all these shows flatter themselves with.

By the time of the final the crowd of hopeful crooners had been whittled down to two: Elias Hämäläinen (a.k.a. Matthew Broderick ca. 1986, red velvet jacket) and Samuli Taskinen (a foetus wearing a weird seahorse earring in one ear). The show was broadcast live, the venue being filled with a crowd of a thousand 13-year-olds holding up signs reading either ‘Elias’ or ‘Samuli’. Not only did they score minus points for originality but I don’t see how anyone beyond the first three rows could see anything beyond the placards. Not that they seemed to care, since they spent all their time screaming incoherently.

Naturally the entire format is taken in its entirety from the original X Factor just with added Finnish amateurism. At one point in the show Elias and Samuli sang a song together and were joined on stage by one of the judges, music legend Gugi Kokljuschkin. Unfortunately for the finalists, Gugi has more charisma and talent in his left nostril than either of them have in their whole bodies, so they were comprehensively shown up to be the mediocre performers that they are. This idea, which no doubt seemed brilliant in the planning session, was a bad one. If Gugi was actually competing in X Factor it seems impossible he would’ve got past the first round, him not being photogenic enough. However his presence on stage merely emphasised the shallowness of the whole format and the fact that there have been many brilliant Finnish musicians who haven’t needed this bore-fest to become successful.

Ultimately there could be only one winner, and it was Elias who was crowned X Factor champion. Within two seconds Samuli disappeared from our screens never to be seen again. Of course we were treated to several montages of previous rounds in the contest, charting Elias’s journey from comprehensively average busker in Kaisaniemi metro station to comprehensively average contest winner. I mean, I’m not saying I’d be any better – quite the opposite in fact – but this guy is now supposed to be the best singer out of the thousands who entered, yet it’s not that he’s bad, he’s just not very good. I can only assume that serious musicians in Finland don’t enter the contest in the first place. Looking on the bright side it’s going to be another half year or so before we have to put up with it all again, although I’m so jaded by this nonsense already I’m quite sure I won’t give a XXXX then either.

NICK BARLOW