Boyfriend Material(31)

After that, they got into the show proper which, it being the first ever episode, included a really pace-killing explanation of the format that I only half understood, and the presenter—who I was pretty sure wasn’t Holly Willoughby but could have been—didn’t understand at all. There was something involving points, and bidding, and the judges getting a wild card they could use to steal people, and sometimes the contestants got to pick which judge they went with, but mostly they didn’t. And, finally, someone came on and wailed out an aggressively emotional version of “Hallelujah” before being snapped up by one of the Pussycat Dolls.

They filled an hour, plus ad breaks, cycling through variants on the six people who are always on these shows: the cocky guy who nobody wants and is nowhere near as good as he thinks he is, the forgettable one who gets picked up but is destined to be cut in the first of the head-to-heads, the one with the tragic backstory, the quirky one who will go out in the quarter final but will wind up doing better than the actual winner, the one you’re supposed to underestimate but blatantly won’t because Susan Boyle happened, and the good-looking, talented one who the public will uniformly hate for being too good-looking and talented. Between the performances and the saccharine vid packages about people’s mums and hometowns, the judges had the sort of banter you’d expect from people who’d never met and had nothing in common except having reached a point in their careers where judging a reality TV show was their best option.

It was annoyingly watchable, is what I’m saying. And even Oliver would glance up occasionally to offer a comment. Apparently he hadn’t got the memo that the only socially acceptable way to watch reality TV was ironically because he kept saying things like, “I was very concerned for the shy girl with the NHS glasses and the braces, but I was very moved by the way she sang ‘Fields of Gold.’” And then I’d wish I had a blueberry to throw at him.

We got to a bit where Jon Fleming bid heavily on a girl with a harmonica (quirky one: will go out in quarter finals) only for Simon from Blue to play his wild card early and steal her out from under him. And it was the best moment so far by a mile. My dad tried to act all chill about it, but you could tell he was pissed off. Which meant, for about thirty seconds, I became a massive fan of Simon from Blue, while also not being able to name a single one of his songs.

I’m not entirely sure why—it could have been masochism, or Stockholm syndrome, or secretly feeling kind of cosy—but I queued up the second episode. It was pretty much identical in format to the first: the judges still didn’t know how to talk to each other, the presenter still didn’t seem to understand the rules, and the contestants were still telling heartwarming stories about their dead grandmas and day jobs at Tesco’s. We kicked off with a mum of three throwing everything she had at a two-minute version of “At Last,” which nobody went for, but then insisted afterwards they should have gone for before promptly forgetting about her. Then we got a seventeen-year-old boy, peeking shyly from behind the world’s floppiest fringe, black-painted nails on fingers curled tightly round the mic, who gave a weirdly fragile and affecting performance of “Running Up That Hill.”

“Oh,” remarked Oliver, glancing up from his laptop, “that was rather good.”

Apparently the judges thought so, too, and Ashley Roberts and Professor Green got into a slightly crazy bidding war for him that ended with Ashley Roberts pulling out and then Jon Fleming—with a sense of the dramatic honed over a career that, as the intro kept telling us, had spanned five decades—jumping out of his chair to play his wild card. This left the kid, Leo from Billericay, free to choose between the professor and my dad.

Obviously, the show cut straight to a commercial break, and we came back after an ad for car insurance with the tense music still playing, and Jon Fleming about to launch into his “pick me” speech.

He’d gone back to his seat and was sitting with an elbow on the armrest, and his cheek against his fingers, his blue-green eyes fixed intently on Leo from Billericay. “What was in your head,” he asked, in that nonspecifically regional burr that always made him sound so worldly and sincere, “while you were singing that?”

Leo squirmed behind his fringe and muttered something the mic completely failed to catch.

“Take your time, son,” Jon Fleming told him.

The camera jumped briefly to the other judges, who were all wearing their best this-is-amoment faces.

“My dad…” Leo managed “…he died. Last year. And we never really agreed about a lot of stuff. But music was, like, the thing that really brought us together.”

There was a perfect televisual pause. Jon Fleming leaned forward. “That was a beautiful performance. I could tell how much the song meant to you, and how much of your heart you put into it. I’m sure your dad would have been proud of you.”

What.

The.

Fuck.

Okay, I felt very sorry for Leo from Billericay, because he was clearly bereaved, and having a shit relationship with an absent father sucked. But it didn’t change the fact that my absent father was having a redemptive bonding experience with some prick from Essex on national TV while I watched from the sofa of my fake boyfriend’s house.

Oliver glanced over. “Are you all right?”

“Yeahimfinewhywouldntibe?”

“No reason. But if hypothetically you stopped being fine and wanted to, I don’t know, talk about anything, I’m right here.”