The X Factor and heroes

posted by Brit, in Bryan's continued absence

Readers of Thought Experiments spend their Saturday evenings either (a) contemplating profound philosophical conundrums and turning them into esoteric poetry, or (b) in America, so you will never have heard of The X Factor.

I will therefore explain that it is a populist television programme which consumes approximately 93% of ITV's weekend schedule, and which has two aims. The first and by far the least of these aims is to find, by way of gradual, painstaking whittling, a member of the public to sing a Christmas Number One (the previous two winners have been called Leona and Leon, so by my process of logical deduction the prize will this year be won by someone called Leo. Get down the bookies now and put your mortgage on it). The second and more important of The X Factor's raisons d'etre is for a smart alec bully called Simon Cowell to humiliate a bumbling Irish porker called Louis Walsh.

But anyway, I do not intend to sneer at The X Factor any further because I come to praise it. A few months ago I visited SeaWorld in Florida, and among the many surprising and delightful things I encountered there was a reaffirmation of the US's attitude to its military servicemen. Soldiers and their families are given free entry, special reserved seats and discounts galore everywhere they go. At the beginning of the killer whale show, members of US and UK forces in the audience - "heroes" - are asked to stand. Their close-ups are projected onto the big screen and are met by a huge wall of applause - unaffected, genuine, apolitical, non-cynical.

As an Englishman witnessing this, I felt many things, and not least, shame at the way we treat our own active servicemen. In terms of the media, the BBC is the worst. Oh so good at covering the pomp and solemnity of Remembrance Sunday, where the soldiers of the Somme are sufficiently abstracted and poeticised to celebrate, the Guardianista Tristrams of BBC News have completely bought the Michael Moore line when it comes to the men and women in Iraq or Afghanistan. The notion that soldiers can be "heroes" is banished. Instead they must fall into one of only two categories: human rights abusers and prisoner torturers; or hapless idiot victims of our wicked foreign policy, uneducated and suckered into signing up.

The one comfort is that this attitude has never reflected the attitude of the general public, and it has taken The X Factor to prove it. The show's charity single is in aid of wounded servicemens' organisation Help for Heroes, it is called Hero, and it has smashed sales records for the year. Say what you like about Simon Cowell, but don't knock him for populism - the alternative is often far worse.