Week 4 Last Stage Auditions

So that's a wrap for auditions for this year. That seemed to be over quickly. I am sure these were stretched out across more weeks in the past with both lots of idiot auditions and more full length airings of the decent too. I suppose that it's also possible that fewer people are applying in the first place and the numbers generally are down but the size of crowds in the hot summer queues around the country looked as big as any year and that needn't impact upon how many are shown in these run-up programmes.

Anyway, we should now have seen each of the Top 12 or whatever it's going to be (allowing for wild cards, judges' extra choices, the Xtra One, the Fifth Judge save or whatever new idea the producers have in mind!)

Getting through tonight on the main programme were

Brick City

Code 4

Giles Potter

Hannah Sheares

Joe Whelan

Ryan Mathie

Sam Callahan

Zoe Devlin

A load more also were put through to Bootcamp but I suspect that that is as far as they will go. Of the acts I've picked out above, the ones I see doing well, Ryan Mathie made the biggest impact with a cool version of the now song Get Lucky. Giles Potter messed up badly but the judges must have seen something during earlier auditions and appeared almost before he'd finished to be putting him through anyway.

Sam Callahan is the cute boy this year and Joe Whelan the dad with muscles and tatoos who will appeal to whoever doesn't like the cute Sam.

Zoe Devlin isn't, as far as I'm aware, Janet's sister. She has a curious stage presence and an appealing style. How that will translate to a range of material and how she'll cope with live shows I'm not sure. There is another quirky girl who is likely to get The Quirky One space this year.

Hannah Sheares is very, very pretty. She's the one who was picked out of The Daisy Chains. Nervous and not really any competition for the likes of Melanie McCabe, I feel.

Code 4 and Brick City are a couple of fairly bland groups in terms of what they've shown us so far. However, both are competent and should be in with a chance once they get more airtime. They do have to cope with the uber-confident Rough Copy, though.

Hopefully next week we should have a clear picture of just who makes it through to Judges' Houses and that's when it really starts to get interesting.

This week may see the end of the impressively massive mouth of Jason Newland. That massive mouth may have got him in trouble as some of his tweets have got into the public arena. They were there anyway but once you get on programmes like X Factor you need to be prepared for everything you've ever published or done to be in the papers before long. Seems like he's a rude and nasty bit of work with a violent temper that he may not always be able to control. Despite that all being in the past, I don't see him surviving that. No biggie, to be honest, apart from that mouth.