X Craptor

We worked at the kitchen table all day today, prepping material for our workshop week, which starts tomorrow. We tripped along at a fair rate of knots, which meant our evening was freed up to watch a bit of telly. We saw last night's X Factor, which, yet again was a complete road crash, with a massive whiff of product placement for Talk Talk TV, Nick Grimshaw going on about his hatred of musical theatre, and all the judges smack talking each other and rabbiting away in "street" cliches; "you got to bring it ten times harder." How the hell can you bring something harder? Could you bring me back some shopping? But make sure you bring it hard...

It was "re-invention" week this week, which appeared to mean that everyone sang "mash-ups" - which these days is what we call what we used to call musical montages. A "mash up" in my view is two songs superimposed on top of one another to create a new piece rather than two discrete songs segueing from one to another. Call me old fashioned. The ultimate mash up was Freak Like Me by the Sugababes. Or maybe that was just a heavily-used Gary Newman sample... Anyway, when Rita Ora started shouting "mash it up, mash it up, mash it up, boom" in a cod Jamaican accent, I felt so ashamed I wanted to gouge my eyes out with a spoon.

On and on Ollie Murs went about how he'd once been a contestant on the show. Didn't win though did he?

And then the infernal advert breaks... After every act. Adverts you can't skip on catch up. And adverts which are the same every time. My least favourite at the moment features the dreadful Nicole Kidman interacting with those ludicrous meerkats. She's had so much plastic surgery that the entire top half of her face has stopped moving. How can you be an actress if your face doesn't move?

Anyway, during the evening, we received an email suggesting that Cat, who we're working with on the mystery project, was down at the office in Kentish Town printing music and scripts, so we rushed to the shops to buy a load of chocolate, jumped in the car and drove down the road to give her a bit of moral support.

It was lovely to get out of the house.

We talked about children's telly in the 1980s and she was astonished to learn that there was a presenter back in the day called Christopher Lillycrap. Worse than his name was the fact that he presented a show called Flicks, the logo for which looked entirely like the word "fucks."

We dropped Cat back home in Finsbury Park (which is Krapy rub sniff backwards) and then came home to continue trawling through the X Factor.

Another double elimination. I can barely contain myself.