X Factor launch 2015: This is what the show should be, one big telly disco

We watched, we coveted Caroline Flack’s outfits, we did some pretty good sofa dancing to be honest

Picture credit: ITV

A couple of series’ ago, X Factor reached peak sob story. Barely had each man, woman or teenager harping on about how they’d been doing this their whole ten minute-long lives arrived, than producers had managed to pick through the contents of their brains to find the one thing most likely to make someone on a sofa in Leicester shoulder-heave from sobbing. By the end of it, we’d all become so hardened to it that we’d roll our eyes (real ones, not even just emoji ones) and go and get a packet of Doritos as soon as the Ed Sheeran soundtrack kicked in.

It was one of a lot of things that contributed to X Factor fatigue. Bored of the same formats, the cliches (it’s a yes or a no, guys, prefixing it with ‘a billion percent’ doesn’t make any difference) and with about 785 8pm rivals waiting for us on Netflix, mutterings started. “I think I might not watch X Factor this year,” whispered our most X Factor-loving mates after three wines. “I’m not sure I’ve got another series in me.” There was even talk of - oh god - switching to Strictly.

Picture credit: ITV

And yet somehow, we were all there on our sofas this weekend for this year’s X Factor launch because Simon Cowell is Derren Brown in a bootcut jean.

It wasn’t perfect. The judges are still big fans of using a cliché where a genuine sentence would work well (will someone leave a thesaurus open on the judges’ desk on the page which deals with the phrase ‘smash it’? Thanks), Rita Ora and Nick Grimshaw still need to bed in and hanging Olly Murs’ mate out to dry was grubbier than the oldest white t-shirt in Cowell’s vast collection. Seeing Josh Daniel talk about the best friend he lost was as uncomfortable as it always is watching someone talk about personal grief on a reality show, too. I’d have far preferred to just watch his incredible audition.

Picture credit: ITV

Picture credit: ITV

Picture credit: ITV

Picture credit: ITV

Picture credit: ITV

Picture credit: ITV

Picture credit: ITV

But in the midst of that, this was three hours of Bank Holiday weekend TV which regularly made me smile. There were some genuinely brilliant performances: Seann Miley Moore’s The Show Must Go On, Fourth Power-if-you-gloss-over-the-small-matter-of-that-controversy, Lauren Murray, Chloe Paige, Louisa Johnson and her very nice bandana (we wanted that too, as well as everything Flack put on her bod).

At many points (especially during Jennifer Phillips’ rendition of Shackles and First Kings’ Uptown Funk), I wanted to join in with the judges desk disco because as anyone who works in an office where the fizzy wine comes out at 4pm on a Friday knows, desk discos are awesome - and our ones didn’t even have Cheryl Fernandez-Versini at them.

Welcome back X Factor - fewer sob stories, urgent delivery on that thesaurus and regular desk discos and this could be the best series in a long time.