About two million hours in – or, the length of an X Factor final itself – we finally got somewhere. Bing purchases the ‘Hot Shot’ ticket and accompanies a nervous Abi , who is beginning to have doubts about the whole ordeal. Bing talks her into it, and they swoop down to get her checked in. Bing gets a ‘Hot Shot’ stamp on his hand as her designated friend/family, and is told it’ll probably last ‘about two months’. No kidding, I’ve suffered at the hands of an overzealous stamper before when I’ve been on a night out, and it SUCKS. Led to the ‘backstage’ area, we get a glimpse of the ‘behind the scenes’ bit we always see on X Factor/Britain’s Got Talent, where hoardes of hopeless hopefuls are warming up or stretching out. The only difference is they’re all in grey tracksuits. No Kitty Brucknells here (THANK GOD.)

FINALLY, I think. We’re getting somewhere. Eventually Abi gets through to the stage, and we see the judges: Judges Charity, Hope, and…you guessed it, Wraith. A quote from 1 Corinthians (chanks Google, sadly I can’t remember huge chunks of the Bible myself) says this: ‘And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity’. Nice one guys, rhyming ‘charity’ with ‘charity’ was really ace. Anywho. I’m not in any way saying you’d have been better pushed to spend the time reading the Bible, no sirree bob. But what in God’s name was Rupert Everett thinking with his bizarre accent?

I still can’t work out if it was Aussie, New Zealand or South African. I like to imagine that he’s the kind of actor who gets really, really into the role, and just showed up at rehearsal and went ‘guys. Guys! I’VE GOT IT. I’m going to make him an Aussie/New Zealander/South African!’, and everybody just had to go ‘heeeey! Nice one Rupes, great idea’ etc etc until he shut up and drank his Starbucks. I adore Rupert Everett, I just didn’t understand what the accent was about. I would guess that they didn’t want it to be an impression of Simon Cowell, but last week worked on the basis of Rory Kinnear looking like a love child of Nick Clegg and David Cameron, so why would you deviate from that? Julia Davis was clearly giving her all to an impression of Amanda Holden. Everett just perched on the end looking like a mug shot of George Michael and acting up a storm, but with an ACCENT.

Aaand calm. Anyway, they hustled Abi into the spotlight, and she sang, and Judge Wraith began to talk about her taking her top off, and she looked confused and nervous, and Judge Hope (Everett) said ‘throw another shrimp on the Barbie, mate’. Then the crowd (all made up of avatars) cajoled Abi into signing up to be one of Wraiths Babes. She agreed. The kind, naive, innocent Abi was hauled off to provide 24 hour porn, which Bing himself would later have to watch (not having enough merits to skip it.) Even the scene where he had to watch her tartily made up face contorted on screen wasn’t quite there for me. I may be an utter pervert, but I wanted to see even more humiliation for her. Otherwise it was just a girl with some makeup on with some chap’s thumb in her mouth. A normal Friday out in Tunbridge Wells, what what!

Has anybody ever watched Babestation? Because that’s what Wraith Babes sort of was. If you haven’t, you’ve got to. True fact: you can actually hear your soul steadily seeping away. I remember flicking onto it with a friend and talking about the deadened eyes and plastic lips of the girls. It’s not even porn – the girls have sex with the air as opposed to a man/woman/pig, and they can never take their knickers off, I believe. What upsets me the most about watching it is thinking ‘that’s somebody’s little girl. That plastic chested, shark eyed girl was once a baby.’ Unbearable. I’d hazard a guess that a lot of girls who go for ‘modelling’ careers end up there. So, that’s what lovely Abi with the origami penguins and the fringe was consigned to for the rest of her life.

I don’t think a good enough reason was given as to why. Ok, she’d been drugged slightly before she went on, and the audience of avatars were cheering for her to do it, but really there wasn’t a moment when I saw that she had to make that choice. And she had a choice – it was porn or back to the bikes. Dude! The bikes weren’t that bad! Sorry, but if Brooker can make me think that the PM had no choice but to have sex with a pig on live TV, he should be able to make me think a girl can sell herself to a life of Babestation.

I found the avatar audience pointless. It lost the imposing feel of a real audience. If you’ve watched a talent show, you know that the ugliest part is when the camera turns on the audience and focuses on a single face as it turns from delight to anger, and starts chanting ‘off, off! OFF!’ And here’s where my stumbling block was. I was expecting this programme to really, really rinse X Factor/BGT for all it was worth. I thought Cowell would be completely lampooned. I thought the whole franchise would wriggle under the weight of Brooker’s careful and precise incisions.

Read the final part, Part Three here: https://ameliaflorencesimmons.wordpress.com/2011/12/12/fifteen-million-merits-part-three/