Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times:

I’ll be glued to the axe factor, Simon

It was once a popular form of entertainment in working men’s clubs in the northeast of England to watch mentally disabled people singing, dancing and juggling. This cruel form of variety show was exposed to appalled southerners by, among others, The Sunday Times and soon ceased.

It was reinvented as a form of mass entertainment by Simon Cowell, under the guise of The X Factor. After 17 years the show will end, Cowell now says.

Call me a snob, but I cannot think of a television programme that has had a more deleterious effect on this nation’s culture. The manufactured dross, the manipulation of talentless wannabes, the shrieking hysteria of the lumpenprole audience. Thank God it’s over.

And for those who liked it — well, you can still watch C-list exhibitionists try to bake a cake, so all is not lost.
I can't stand these contest programmes where people are pitted against each other and often humiliated. I think it started with The Weakest Link. If the broadcasters got rid of them they could bring back some decent programmes, e.g. dramas or comedies to give actors some work.

The demand and desire to appear on national TV, from the talented and untalented, is simply enormous - and they are well looked after and rewarded.

It's the fifteen minutes of fame syndrome and has always been so. Reality TV programs are just another version, where the participants are just already known.

Paul wrote:
The demand and desire to appear on national TV, from the talented and untalented, is simply enormous - and they are well looked after and rewarded.

It's the fifteen minutes of fame syndrome and has always been so. Reality TV programs are just another version, where the participants are just already known.

Just scrap TV.

The last show I watched properly was Friday Night Lights that finished in 2012 I think.

Even dramas have to be woke now and comedy is dead and lot of the sitcoms were grew up were actually crap. I watched Just Good Friends during the first lockdown. Vincent would of made a good MP with his pathological lying, there's tons of so-called classic comedies that the main character's are scumbags.

Keeping Up Appearances has the same plot in every episode and the running jokes are feeble.

Budgie was about as amusing as poking your eye.