The X Factor: The Band review – Cowell's tragic bid to revive a dying show

Strictly Come Dancing has managed to maintain its status as a national institution for 15 years, while its old rival The X Factor, which also started in 2004, has seen its cultural dominance slowly slip away. There are countless reasons for its decline. The pop industry is always shifting and the old gatekeepers have far less clout than they once did. A hit can happen whether they want it to or not, just as a career can tank, no matter how much is thrown at it. (Try to name the last three X Factor winners.)

It is understandable, then, that Simon Cowell can’t resist tinkering with the format. But endless nips-and-tucks have left it worse off. The X Factor: Celebrity managed to sour even the usual winning formula of taking something popular and adding famous people. An All Stars version (bringing back former contestants to compete again) has been pushed back indefinitely. Now The X Factor: The Band (ITV) looks set to continue this cursed run. Presumably, Cowell was hoping to breathe new life into the franchise; instead, he appears to be keeping it on life support against doctors’ best advice.

The Band has been rushed out. Spanning four episodes across one week, it feels like a peculiar addition to the format, rather than a genuine contender for what it might do next if it has any chance of survival. The concept is that Cowell and guests audition singers, then form two bands – a boy band and a girl band – who compete in a live final on Sunday. If it sounds familiar, that is because it is an expedited Pop Stars: The Rivals, best known for bringing us Girls Aloud and One True Voice (RIP) in 2002.

At the start of the first episode on Monday, Cowell announced he had “never done it quite under this pressure before”. But the pressure is of his own making: he has admitted that he brought the show forward because Little Mix, who came up through The X Factor, are doing their own band-based talent show on BBC One next year and he wanted to sneak in ahead of it. Perhaps that is good business sense; perhaps it is the unedifying spectacle of a powerful man pulling rank on the women he helped to make famous. You decide.

On Monday, Cowell proclaimed he is looking for singers with “a sense of humour, personality, ambition ... rather than puppets”, which is a bit like Rod Hull telling Emu he is over the whole hand-up-bum thing. The auditions suggested an artisanal X Factor – hand-crafted, back to basics, the equivalent of those rootsy “independent” coffee shops filled with wonky furniture that turn out to be owned by a supermarket.

The process was stark and simple. Singers arrived at Syco HQ to sing in Cowell’s office, a giant portrait of his face looming in the background. Songwriters and producers from the Syco machine sat on the sidelines, a mini-audience, namedropping stars such as “Ri” who have performed their songs. If the contestant got the promising “home and family” preamble, they didn’t have a TV crew visit their house, but rather filmed it themselves on their smartphones. That is more in keeping with the social media content you might expect from teenagers, but it looked budget and dashed off. “I usually can tell within the first couple of seconds if someone has ‘it’ or not,” said guest judge Nicole Scherzinger, sagely. Perhaps that is why the series is only four episodes long.

Tellingly, you could play a drinking game based on the amount of times someone mentioned One Direction – and you would be drunk enough not to notice just how much has changed since 2004. It felt appropriately weird to watch Cowell criticise a teenage girl for her “image” (what she has chosen to wear). Most noticeably, the nos were less frequent, and far less brutal than they used to be. The starting point for almost everyone on the show is good, and the feedback lacked the excoriating meanness that used to be par for the course. That is progress of sorts, I suppose.

On Wednesday, the girls faced off; on Friday, the boys will do the same. By Sunday, we will have the head to head that would usually come as the culmination of weeks’ worth of building up a fanbase for acts that have earned it. Can it be rushed? Cowell must be wondering. The ratings on Monday were not promising. But it is hard to get excited by a return to something we have seen so many times before. It is clear that there are talented singers and songwriters here, but it is no longer enough to watch them go through a tired process in the hope that they will get noticed, particularly when we know this isn’t the star-making machine it once was. The X Factor: The Band is not bad, not terrible, but it is only fine – and, in 2019, that means it has to be a no from me.