eX-Factor

Remeber all the way back at the beginning of April when I got my ninth follower, Cathy, I thought that she was good friends with none other than Will Young!

Sadly, it transpired, she was not friends with Will Young at all. The person that was friends with Cathy was someone claiming to be Sam Trong.

The thing is readers, I was watching the X-Factor at the weekend and I saw another chap that looked uncannily like Cathy's friend 'Sam'. It was none other than Rikki Loney.

Click the links above and see for yourself. I'm thinking that either a) Sam changed his name to Rikki because it sounded more like a pop star, or b) Rikki was a would-be pop star and didn't want to be mixed up with Will Young, so claimed to be someone called Sam!

It's convoluted readers I know, but that's showbiz. Well, sadly it didn't work out for Rikki as he was unceremoniously booted off the show. Joining everyone's favourite stripper quartet Kandy Rain on the scrapheape of failure.

My band Miss Frank are still in the running, although, I must confess I saw their performance on the show and they weren't particularly good. In fact, they were rubbish. Not as rubbish as John & Edward Grimes, a pair of objectionable identical twins from Dublin. God only knows how they stayed on the show. Former Boyzone star, fellow Irishman and former pupil of Louis Walsh Stephen Gately must be turning in his grave.

Poor old, or rather young, Stephen Gately passed away in unfortunate circumstances didn't he? I'm not going to cast aspersions about Gately, Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir, did that, and the press complaints commission in the UK received an unprecidented amount of complaints from the public. Still, there's no smoke without fire is there? That said, her piece was pretty damn low, as the Guardian Hack Charlie Brooker explained.

The thing is, I (and I suspect a massive majority of the people who complained to the press complaints commission) would never have read Moir's poison were it not for Brooker's piece. It would be like me attending a Derby County match and complaining that there were too many anti-Notts Forest chants. Not unlike all those Muslims who burned copies of the Satanic Verses without ever reading it or the Christians of America burning copies of Iron Mainden's The Number of the Beast without ever listening to it.

It's a funny old world.

Baz